


Jacks and Stars

by Pyromaniacal



Category: Real Person Fiction
Genre: Government Conspiracy, Illegal activity, Not Septiplier, Science Fiction, or a ship fic at all honestly, sci fi, scifi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2019-07-10 11:57:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 29,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15948878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyromaniacal/pseuds/Pyromaniacal
Summary: Jack McLoughlin is a former victim of the strange government conspiracy HESHE. As he attempts to adjust to society, he meets celebrity YouTuber Mark Fischbach and uncovers a terrible secret about his past, endangering his friends and newly-discovered lifestyle.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> NO LONGER UPDATING.
> 
> An old, relatively unpolished YT fic, originally published a couple years ago on my dA. Figured it wouldn't be too out of place here.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A mysterious man with no past enters the world for the first time.

24 years I have been waiting here. 24 years of nothing; no memories, no experiences. I have seen nothing, met no one. No one... until today.

Today, I made a memory. Today, I had an experience.

And, for the first time in all 24 years of my life, today I will be free.

-

I did not remember anything at first. My brain was not used to remembering. Fuzzy hallways, painted white; grayish goop, stuck to everything; the hurried speaking of people dressed in uniform. I do not remember the uniform, nor how many people. Those first few hours were all just a blur. Everything was a blur until the room.

The room was spacious, and square; it was painted light yellow, and had colorful posters placed at irregular intervals along the walls. There were chairs and I sat in one. There were others in the chairs. They were all younger than me.

The oldest of the others was a teenager. He had dark eyes and hair cropped like mine. Everyone's hair was cropped like that, regardless of gender, regardless of race. Were we in uniform as well?

I did not know the purpose of the room then; I now realize we were supposed to socialize. We did not.

Most of the people in the room, disregarding me and the teenager, were children; no older than ten or eleven, no younger than six or seven. There were perhaps a dozen of us, maybe two. We sat in silence until someone new came into the room - a woman, mid-fifties. She was decently plump, and her form very rounded - she seemed to not have a sharp edge anywhere. Her grey hair was pulled back into a bun, and she was not wearing the same thing as the other people we had seen. If the uniforms were for workers, she must have been a supervisor.

I do not remember exactly what she said, but the gist of it was clear; we had been part of an experiment against our will, and it was time to right the wrongs done. We would go live in the outside world as normal people, normal people with normal lives, and no one would know of the terrible experiment. She then began taking people aside to a separate room, one by one, starting with the youngest, a little redheaded girl. And so we waited, and did not socialize.

Most of the children spent less than a quarter of an hour in the room, but a few took longer. Some of the children came out of the room red-faced, as if they had been crying, some came out with huge grins. After several hours of waiting, I saw the dark-eyed boy exit the room and sit smugly back into his chair. The woman strode toward my seat. "It's your turn." 

-

The new room I was in was not nearly as cheery as the previous. The walls were painted a harsh white, and there was little in the way of room decor besides a plastic potted plant in the corner. A large desk filled up most of the room; behind it were beige file cabinets and a black office chair. There was an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair on my side of the desk as well that was clearly designed for someone much smaller than me. The desk was covered in papers covered in text. I didn't bother to read them.

"Sit down, please," the woman told me, and I sat in the tiny chair on my side of the desk, fidgeting to adjust to its minuscule form. She had seated herself in the office chair and now was facing me. She picked up a stack of papers from the desk, and placed them in front of me after moving aside a pile of manila folders. She then motioned to introduce herself. "I'm Dr. Carolyn Bartlett, the head of the Human Experimentation Societal Habilitation Effort, otherwise known as HESHE. It is our goal to help governmental experiment victims like yourself reinstate into society."

I wasn't sure how to react, or if I should react at all. Blearily, I asked, "Bartlett? Like the pear?"

"I suppose. Is there a pear called Bartlett?" She sounded surprised. "May I continue?"

"Yes. Sorry."

"It is crucial for a participant in society to have an identity. In fact, it is unheard of for someone to not. Almost everyone in our society is given at least a name at birth, and grow up surrounded by our constructs. Whether they want one or not, everyone at least has a place here. An identity. Obviously, with you and your compatriots this is not the case."

"It isn't?" I asked.

"Oh, no. You see, your amnesia was not an accident. You simply have no memories to remember - no memories of who you are, because you never were anyone. Not until now, but now you can be anyone you want to be, because you can have an identity."

I remember wondering at the time why Pear Lady treated an identity as some kind of higher privilege, if so many people had one. If I and the others were soon to have one.

"In order to function in the real world at all, you are going to need a name and some identification. Your surname will be simply carried on from your... donor's name, but you can choose your given name. It's your identity, after all."

I looked down at the papers in front of me. Most of the information on them seemed to make little sense. I pointed to one number I saw repeated particularly often across the forms. “What does ‘SML006’ mean?”

She studied the cipher for a moment. “Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything, not anymore.”

The room was draped in silence for a moment as I let the number sink into my consciousness, running it through my head, ingraining it into my memory. Even if it didn’t mean anything, I wanted to hang onto this little scrap of information. For what purpose, I couldn’t tell you.

My peaceful silence was interrupted by Pear Lady’s apparent impatience. “Now, a name.”

I had nothing. I had not lived in the world, did not know who this “identity” I was supposed to have was. I studied the room - the plant, the file cabinets, the mess on the desk. My gaze finally came to rest on what looked to be a small metal star, kicked into the corner of the room. It expanded into so many directions with its six points, so many directions I could take, I could follow, I could be. “Jack,” I said slowly. “I would be okay with Jack.”

“A fine choice,” Pear Lady concluded, and finished filling out my paperwork. As I was ushered out of the room, I bent down and pocketed the jack I had discovered.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack attempts to converse with the dark-eyed teenager.

The next few hours were incredibly busy. With the paperwork complete, the workers were rushing about, trying to give us our identities and directions and move us to the right places. We were taught rules and customs and speech patterns and who knows what else. I watched many official-looking people come and go, speaking in hurried voices about “the patients” and “the victims.” Most of them focused their attention on the children - I could only assume that they were to be the kids’ guardians. Eventually all the children were loaded onto buses and sent away. Me and Dark Eyes were soon the only ones remaining.  
  
Dark Eyes looked fifteen, maybe sixteen. His short hair was black and he had a notable widow’s peak. He was also wearing a pair of glasses - I could only assume issued to him by the HESHE workers. They were chunky, square, and plastic. I heard him muttering something to himself - his voice, having not quite dropped all the way, was low and cracked frequently. “ _MFB051MFB051MFB051MFB051MBF051-_ ”  
  
“Hm?” I inquired.  
  
“MFB051. It was number on the forms, repeated all over. She wouldn’t tell me anything about it. But why would you care?”  
  
“I had a number like that on my forms, too. Except… it wasn’t that number. It was a different number.”  
  
“Okay, good for you.” He shrugged me off.  
  
“I’m Jack.”  
  
“Cool. I don’t care.” He radiated apathy. I decided to stop prodding.  
  
We had been sitting in silence for a minute, maybe two or three, when Pear Lady entered the room in which we had been waiting. She was holding a few manila folders and two shiny cards - they were tan with blue and red text. One had a photo of me, the other had a photo of Dark Eyes. Identities, for the both of us. She handed us each a card and a folder.  
  
“These cards contain all the identification you will need to access almost all of civilian America, the country in which we currently reside. In the folder, you will find a few useful courtesies, as well as all the legal paperwork that will be required of you and a check for $3000. As legal adults, it will be your duty to spend and manage this money as you will.”  
  
Dark Eyes was eighteen? He certainly didn’t look or frankly act it. I took the opportunity to sneak a glance at his identity card - besides a name, it had a birthdate in 1998. Perhaps whatever the experiment was kept him from maturing properly, or he could have simply been a late bloomer. But it didn’t really seem to matter. We were here now, and would make our next choices accordingly.  
  
“You should be able to find the exit if you enter the third door on the right in that hallway. From there, you can find a payphone and call a cab, if you so wish. Go to the city, go somewhere else. The world is yours.” She nodded toward the doorway. “There’s a card in your folder with a number to call if you ever need help.”  
  
I opened the folder - so there was. That was comforting to know.  
  
“Jack, Merlin - I wish you good luck with the world.” She walked out of the room, leaving me and Dark Eyes - Merlin, I suppose he was - to examine our next move.  
  
I stared down at the identity card Pear Lady had given me. It had a photo of my face, as well as several of my statistics - eye color, hair color, height. It had the name of a state - “California,” most likely the state we were in. There were several numbers listed; a birthdate, an expiration date, a registration date. But most importantly, it had a name, my name: Jack McLoughlin.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack has a profoundly odd interaction in the middle of the desert.

The road stretched ahead of me, empty of people, empty of cars, empty of just about everything. Brown, scrubby trees and dead grass swathed either side of the road, disappearing into rolling hills. Occasionally I would catch a glimpse of the city Pear Lady had mentioned: a smoggy, grey expanse sprawled in every direction, shadowed beneath the mountains. 

I had decided to walk to the city - to see the real world, to save my real money. While at first I had marveled at every little thing I saw - plants, sky, dirt, asphalt - now I could barely muster any excitement whatsoever. Look, another dead oak!

Not to mention the heat. Wherever I was, it was absolutely sweltering. The sun, high in the sky, beamed down on me, bright and dry and harsh. The city seemed farther and farther away with each step, and every time I came to an intersection in the road I couldn't help but wonder if I was just going to wander out here, lost, forever. Merlin had clearly made the right decision when he called a cab. I was sick of the desert, sick of the road, sick of the perfectly blue, cloudless sky. I was sick of everything the real world had given me so far.

The repetition, step after step, was killing me, and I was sure I was about to die when - in the distance - I heard something new.

Something like... something like a motor.

Someone was out here! I could be saved!

I stood on the side of the road, trying to seem obvious without being in the car's path. The motor sound grew louder, and suddenly a navy blue sedan crested the hill; I practically jumped into the air, I was so excited! But it was going too fast. The car whipped by, and at first I wasn't sure the driver had even seen me - that is, until they slammed on the brakes.

The tires shrieked. The car, which had been breaking sixty or seventy miles an hour, was clearly not designed to stop that fast. It had stopped several hundred yards down the road from where I was. I watched a man get out and start running towards me. "Hey, hey you!"

I wasn't sure what to do. This was not nearly the reaction I had expected - was this man crazy? This trek I was taking was terrible, but I didn't want to take any chances. I started sprinting in the other direction, wanting to get as far away as possible.

"Hey Jack!"

What? I slowed, turning around. How did this man know my name? There was no way I had ever seen him before. My moment's hesitation was too much, and he caught up to me.

He was in his late twenties, average height. The ends of his dark hair were dyed an orangey-red, as if he'd let his roots grow out, and he had a little bit of stubble on his cheeks, chin, and upper lip. He was clutching a pair of glasses, presumably that he'd taken off to run. Something about this man seemed familiar, but at the time I couldn't name what.

Panting, he stared at me, studying my face. His expression quirked. "You're not Jack."

At this point, I was completely and utterly baffled. I wasn't Jack? I was Jack, my identity said so: right under my photograph, it had my name, and my name said Jack. How did this man know my name in the first place, and why was he taking his word back now? "What?"

"What the hell? What in the freaking hell?! Who are you?" His low voice was rising in pitch. "What are you doing out here? You think this is funny? Why I oughtta - I oughtta-"

I cut him off. "Excuse me, but who are you?"

"Don't you try to pull this shit with me!" He stared at me for a second. His face was red and his hair messy. He was very angry and frustrated, perhaps a little confused? I couldn't really tell. He was certainly upset with me and I had no idea why.

"'Try to pull shit with you?' I'm just happily taking a walk, maybe trying to get down to the city, when a crazed driver crashes into the bushes and starts screaming his head off at me, and I have no idea why. I've never seen him before, and somehow he thinks he recognizes me, and somehow he actually knows my name. How do you know my name?"

"Your name? Your name? That's not your name! That's his name!"

I rummaged through my manila folder until I found the identity card. "Look, it says right here, see? 'Jack McLoughlin.' That's my name. It has a photograph right there."

He stared at it in disbelief. "What the hell?" He delicately took the card in his hands - despite his anger, he was respectful of my property. "You're either both the richest and lousiest impersonator I've ever seen or something definitely weird is going on."

"Impersonator? Impersonator of who?" I stared at my identity in his fingers. I felt lost without it.

He glared at me. "You know damn well! Don't act like- like-" he stuttered over his words. He was confused. I was confused. His car probably would've been confused, too, had it been sentient.

"Sir, can I have my identity card back? I'm really getting anxious without it."

"'Sir?'" He was staring at me.

"Unless you give me your name, I don't know what to call you. Sir."

"You really don't recognize me at all, do you?" He chuckled. "You don't know who I am. You don't know who... you don't know who he is." He was laughing harder now. "I've been some huge dick and you have absolutely no idea why and no idea what's going on and no idea what any of this is and neither do I and God I'm so confused."

"Um. Can I have my card back?"

He handed it back to me. I carefully filed it with HESHE's phone number in the manila folder, feeling more complete with it in my possession once again. His laughing subsided and he gestured me over to his car. "You want a ride to the city? I feel like I owe you at least a favor for all that nonsense."

I wasn't sure - after all, he had exploded at me with little warning - but it seemed like he was genuinely a good guy. A confused and easily flustered good guy, but still a good guy nonetheless. "That would be nice. You know, to get out of the heat."

He nodded and opened the passenger door. "It's hot today. I'm surprised you were this far out here at all." He shut the door and entered into the driver's seat. After starting the ignition, he looked back at me. "I'm Mark, by the way."

I smiled. "Nice to meet you."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mark takes Jack to a diner, where the two grow suspicious of each other.

Mark stopped the car outside of what he called a '60s-style diner at the edge of the city - ("Really, I should take you out to lunch. Common courtesy, you know."). Before we left the car, he handed me a baseball cap with a long brim and a pair of fake glasses. 

"What are these for?"

"You know how I recognized you and it was weird? Don't want that happening again."

"There are other people who might recognize me?"

"No, duh. And most people would have a much... different reaction than I did. Especially with me around, I really... I really don't think we should be taking any chances." He placed his glasses in the cupholder of the car and grabbed a cap as well. We exited the car and walked toward the doors of the restaurant. Before we entered, he glanced at me. "By the way, Jack..."

"Hm?" I prompted.

"Would it be alright with you if I called you something else? 'Sam', maybe? Jack is confusing for me, and... a little suspicious, around here."

I had no idea why the name "Jack" could possibly be confusing or suspicious, but he seemed adamant about it. "Sure, I guess."

"Cool. Thanks, Sam."

He held the door for me and we entered the diner. Immediately I was overtaken by the aesthetic of the place. The diner was dimly lit and the dark wooden walls were covered with pop art and photos of old cars. The music was loud, cheerful, and would have been recognizable if I had heard it before - I heard another customer murmur "Beatles," although I didn't know what that meant. The booths were set up into a tight maze, but I was relieved when Mark asked for a table over counter seating when I realized that the counter was far in the back, deep within the maze's coils. 

And the whole place smelled like food! Great, glorious smells of meat and cheese and potatoes. I hadn't realized nearly how hungry I was until we stepped inside. The entire restaurant completely bowled me over, and it was absolutely wonderful. I wanted to bask in the moment for as long as possible, but the waitress pulled us aside to a booth and handed us a couple of menus. "I'll be by in a few minutes to take your order," she recited cheerfully before leaving Mark and me in silence.

Mark was staring at his menu, but obviously wasn't reading it. His eyes were fixed, as if he were staring at something far in the distance. I couldn't tell if it was because he already knew what he wanted or if he was trying to avoid conversation or something else. I glanced at my menu, but it was far too long. There were too many choices and I had absolutely no idea what to pick. "Mark, do you have a... a recommendation?"

"Hm?" he looked up, pulled out of his trance. "Just get the basic one if you don't know what to get." 

I scanned the menu until I found the sandwich he was referring to: the "Original Hamburger." The description told me that it was a "juicy 1/3 pound burger with lettuce, tomato, and pickles on a sesame bun with a side of your choice". I had no idea what a burger was, but I directed myself to the sides menu anyway, where a similarly large list of choices presented themselves. I gave up. "I'll just get whatever you get."

He shrugged. "Suit yourself." He waved the waitress over and gave her an order. I wasn't paying any attention - ever since hunger had finally caught up to me, I had wanted something, anything, to feed the dull, gnawing pangs growing in my stomach. As the waitress left, I glanced back toward Mark, trying to form my question. "What is a hamburger, anyway? There's a city called Hamburg in Germany but I didn't know anything about a food."

Mark stared at me for a second, his glare prodding me, interrogating my features as if they were criminals on trial. "You don't know what a burger is?"

"Um, no?"

"This is getting weirder and weirder."

He hadn't answered my question. I squirmed in my seat, wanting Mark to say something, wanting the waitress to come back, wanting to do anything I could to alleviate this awkward moment. Finally Mark spoke again. "Say, Sam... I've been meaning to ask you, what were you doing way out in the middle of nowhere like that anyway? No car, no phone, no one for miles. It's... it's strange. Really, really strange."

"Um." How could I tell him about everything that had happened? About HESHE, Pear Lady, and an experiment I knew nothing about. About how I had no thoughts, no memories, no experiences of anything that had happened prior to the night before. And could I even tell him? Pear Lady had made it pretty clear that HESHE's experiment was confidential, or at least that they wanted to keep it a secret. "It's a long story."

"We have time." Mark was absentmindedly tapping the edge of the table.

"No, it's a long story that I don't remember. Maybe that I've never heard before. I don't remember much before you came along. Just that... a bunch of people gave me a bunch of paperwork and some money and told me to go be a contributing member of society. And so I walked down the road to society until you came along. And then all that stuff happened."

"Is that a metaphor?"

"What in that would be a metaphor?"

Mark didn't really believe me, or was fighting with himself to see if he did. I couldn't tell. "Please, Mark. I really don't know anything about this. I don't know why I'm here or who they were or why you recognize me. I don't know anything."

He sighed, resting his head on his hand. "No, I believe you." He didn't have to say the next part. For now, at least.

But then, our sandwiches came, full of tantalizing scents that delighted my primal instincts; I learned what a burger was, and fries, and ate with great gusto. We moved on to lighter conversation topics and refills of beverages; Mark paid; we left the restaurant. His sedan sat, waiting for us, primed for action. I took my papers out of the passenger seat, gave Mark his disguise back, and was about to leave down the street when he grabbed my shoulder. "Wait!"

"What?"

"Do you have a place to stay tonight?"

"No. Why?" Did he have a hotel recommendation?

"I thought, given your... er, situation, you might like to stay with me? Until you get settled."

"What?" Why was he offering me such kindness, when just an hour previous he was so angry with me?

"You're... interesting. I want to know more, to..." To help you learn about your past. To help me learn about HESHE, and whatever the experiment was.

"I guess so...?" I wasn't sure I could trust him, wasn't sure of his motives. He could have been hiding something. But his offer, at least, seemed genuine.

"You guess so or you know so?" Mark teased.

"Will you charge me?"

"If you start freeloading. You'll need a job eventually, anyway."

He seemed fishy and I was suspicious. But I didn't know of any other options. I only had so much money, and I suspected that hotels would drain that stash quickly. "If you're sure, then thank you."

"I'm sure. But we've got a half hour drive ahead of us if the traffic's good. We wait any longer, and it'll just get worse." He held the passenger seat door open for me. "And, you're welcome."

As Mark pulled out of the parking lot and exited onto the road to reach the highway, I rested my head against the window and wondered exactly what I was getting myself into.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Mark arrive home.

An hour of terrible traffic later and Mark pulled the car into a large house in a nice-looking neighborhood. While the outside of the house was painted a rather boring beige, and the grassy lawn in the front a very dead-looking brown ("Water conservation efforts," Mark had said), the house itself presented itself as being a very comfortable, and perhaps rather expensive, type of home. The sedan was parked in the driveway, and Mark invited me out of the car and into the house with a grin.

"You know, I really wasn't expecting anyone staying here for a while," he commented as I made my way inside. "Especially since I'll be out of town in a few weeks, the only place in the house fit for sleeping at all at the moment is probably the couch. I hope you don't mind."

Mark wasn't kidding. It seemed like the entire house was a mess. Boxes, half-unpacked, were strewn everywhere, a city of cardboard roads and towers and subways. Furniture had been hastily pushed out of the way to make way for every kind of miscellany imaginable. I glanced around the room, daunted by the sheer amount of stuff, perhaps searching for an exit, any exit. "Did you just move in?"

Mark laughed, amused by my reaction. "No, just going through some old stuff of mine. A lot of old stuff of mine. I'm not the neatest person, either."

"So where's this mythical couch?" While the piles contained a menagerie of knickknacks and oddities, a couch was nowhere to be found. I picked up a newer-looking black t-shirt decorated with a green logo and a quote in some unreadable font. It was in a size far too large to fit either me or Mark. "And why do you even have some of this junk?"

Mark grabbed the shirt from me, flustered behind the shield of his glasses. "That's... a friend of mine's." He threw it haphazardly onto one of the piles of boxes, as if it were burning. "I need to give it back to him. The couch is this way." 

He stepped around the piles, somehow finding all of the only pieces of ground between them. I carefully copied his footsteps until we finally found the exit to the room, which I could only guess had once been a living room, and stepped into a much tidier, albeit still fairly messy, kitchen and dining area. He waved generally in the direction of the next doorway. "The couch is in there, but don't you have any more stuff?"

"No..." I pressed my folder to my chest. "Just the papers. Nothing else."

An eyebrow quirked in my direction. "Nothing else? That folder's all you own?"

"I guess. It's all I was given at the facility. A bunch of papers, that identity card, and $3000."

"Sam, don't you know you're not supposed to tell other people how much money you have?"

"Oh." Too late. Suddenly, I realized what could happen, saw Mark materialize into a monster in front of me - a dark, tentacled thing, with glowing red orbs for eyes, full of evil and metaphor and pessimism. A gnawing horror seeped up my spine, and I tensed up, shutting my eyes, keeping out the tears-

He interrupted my thoughts with what I can only describe as a worried yip. "Calm down! I'm not going to do anything to you or your money. All I'm saying is that some people might, so just be careful, okay?" He rested his hand on my shoulder, and I inhaled deeply. I needed to trust him, especially if I was going to live in his house.

"Sorry..." I slowly turned around to face him. Sunlight was shining into the kitchen through a skylight, and upon seeing Mark standing in it I was once again struck with the thought that something about this man was very, very familiar. I couldn't tell you what, or why, but something within the contours of his face was closely reminiscent of something, or someone, I had seen before. My breath caught in my throat, and whatever I had meant to say next dissolved into my subconscious, lost forever into the shelves of missed opportunities that everyone has on file somewhere in their mind. 

Suddenly on edge, I stumbled away from him into the couch room. "Let me know if you need anything!" he called after me, seemingly hoping I'd turn around, say something else. But I had no words for him as my head swarmed with dark thoughts of confusion, worry, and fear.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam learns more about Mark.

I don't know when I fell asleep that night. Mark offered to make me dinner several times, and each time I declined; I was too lost in my own thoughts of Mark and HESHE and hot, endless desert roads to have any sort of an appetite. Eventually, the room grew dark, and I attempted to doze on the couch, but it was too small or too stiff or too something and I couldn't manage to keep my eyes closed. After at least an hour of lying awake in the dark, I just rolled off of it to sleep among the boxes on the floor, an organic giant against the stark brown metropolis. When I finally drifted off, I was left in a world that was dark and dreamless, peaceful but boring.

I awoke the next morning underneath something very golden, very warm, and very, very heavy. I couldn't say anything, could hardly think anything, as the sleep sloughed off me as if it were rainwater gushing from drainpipes. I was on the verge of panic about this strange, weighty thing that was crushing my chest in when I met a brown eye, and it made a loud and happy sort of sound. Still grasping at dreamland, I vaguely wondered if I was possibly hallucinating when I heard Mark from the other room. "Up, Chica! Get offa him!" It was firm but cheerful, and I was relieved when the yellow thing bounded off of my chest and towards the source of the voice. Finally able to focus, I saw that it was a large and happy sort of canid, and Mark's coos of "Who's a good doggie? Could it be you, girl?" only confirmed my suspicions.

"You have a dog?" There was no longer a possibility of me sleeping any later. I watched as Mark scratched it - her - behind the ears, and she bounded playfully around his feet. "Why didn't I see her yesterday?"

"Eh, she's shy around new people. Must've figured out you were okay, though. Seems to like you well enough," and he smiled, and it was obvious he had seen the dog's bed-of-choice for the night before. "Normally, she sleeps with me. Huh."

"Anyway," he interrupted himself. "Introductions. Sam, Chica; Chica, Sam. Wanna pet her?" and I took his offer, reaching forward to scratch her lightly on the head, and her brown gaze jumped up at me happily, begging for more. "I have work to do today, Sam, but you can help yourself to anything in the kitchen if you're hungry or something."

"Work?" I asked. "What do you do?" Mark hadn't mentioned anything about working from home, or in fact having a job at all. 

He glanced back at me, an expression written over his face that seemed to say very clearly, Isn't it obvious? before he caught himself, or realized something, or remembered. "Sorry. I forget that not everyone knows."

"...What do you mean? Why would people know what your job is?" Jobs were private things; that's what HESHE had taught me. You kept to your own job and your own life.

"You see, I'm a bit of a celebrity, at least in the loosest sense of the word." He let the dog down onto the floor and shifted his feet awkwardly. "My alias is 'Markiplier,' right? I make videos on this site called YouTube for a living, and I don't mean to brag but at this point I have a pretty big following. Um, a very big following. Like, a millions of people following. So, um." He was looking at me helplessly, an unsuccessful search for the right words. 

I stiffened. HESHE told us to integrate into society, to blend in and be forgotten by the world at large. Not stand out. Standing out was bad, for us experiments, at least - and living with a semi-celebrity who had a gigantic Internet following was definitely standing out. While the world may be meant to have cultural icons, they had said, we were not meant to be some of them, or be anywhere near them. And if Mark was really as big as he said he was, then, well - I couldn't imagine it. "Well. That's a problem."

"What do you mean?" Mark's expression was inquiring. "Most people would love to live with a popular YouTuber for an indeterminate amount of time and essentially for free. Not that I quite understand why, but..."

"Mark, I can't stand out! I can't get associated with some big famous person! I have to blend in, disappear into the world! That's what HESHE told me, that's what I'm gonna do. And living with you, I..." I was almost ready to cry. I couldn't keep my feelings in, I couldn't keep my thoughts out. I grasped at my short, uneven hair and turned away from Mark, too overwhelmed to face him fully. "I have nowhere else to go, Mark, but I can't let people know who I am!"

"Erm, that's not going to be a problem at all." I couldn't see Mark's face anymore, but his tone was still there, dripping with sarcasm. "Not having people know you? Even if you leave right now, my friend, and never come back..." He seemed to cut himself off, revising his train of thought, rerouting it somewhere completely different. "Never mind that. If you stay off camera, and don't go out somewhere too public with me, you should be fine right? Not that I, um, particularly mind, um... well." He was arguing with himself, that much was obvious. Two sides of his consciousness, duking it out with words and opinions, and I heard him shake his head, pushing away some argument that had gone awry. 

Finally, I glanced back at him, and he looked up at me and said, "What I mean to say is, if you really want to stay hidden from the world, I can try my best to help you, but I don't... I don't care what you do, I guess? I don't know, this whole situation is confusing as hell. But, I'm going upstairs to record, so be quiet, okay? If you're really going to try to keep the world from knowing about you, it's a bad idea for you to be making noise to be caught by my microphone in my house. It's your decision, though. I don't really mind if you walk right out of here and announce at the top of your lungs, 'HEY WORLD, I KNOW MARKIPLIER!'"

"You know I won't do that," I said, and Mark shuffled out of the room, Chica following close behind. For a moment, I pondered Mark's internal struggle, how strange it had seemed - it was clear that he didn't care how I chose to let society know who I was, but at the same time... At the same time, he was fighting with something. Something that made it obvious that he didn't want to be associated with me, if the world ever found out.

And then the thought evaporated, and I was left only hungry for breakfast.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Mark go to the library.

Several weeks had passed, and I now ran my fingers through too-long brown bangs rather than short, choppy fluff as I turned page after page. Books; they seemed to be the only pastime during Mark's long work schedule, or at least the only obvious one without leaving the house. Mark didn't seem to be much of a reader, and owned barely a half-dozen novels that I only found after excavating deep into his giant mountains of boxes. They didn't seem to be very good, but they were what I had - that is, until I had finished reading all of them. I realized that I wouldn't be able to bear them the second time around, and would need to find a solution.

Reading, in and of itself, was fine - amazing, actually, and I knew that I would be perfectly content if only I had a decent book on hand. Their scrawling words and fluttering pages could completely envelop my thoughts for hours, days, weeks at a time; the books were birds, flying me away to other worlds where I wasn't a freeloading government experiment living with an odd someone who was barely a celebrity. I needed an aviary of these birds, a treasure trove of literature, open and accessible at all times of day. A library, I realized. I needed a library, and I didn't know where to find one.

Mark's tablet yielded me answers. I entered the query, "public library", and it provided me with what I was looking for almost immediately. To my dismay, there were no libraries in the immediate vicinity; the closest was five miles away, too far for me to walk. Mark would have to drive. I hated that - I wanted to be independent, to be self-sufficient, but most importantly I didn't want to bother my landlord. Even if he didn't mind, I did, and I was unhappy with my complete lack of an ability to self-sustain.

Mark was done recording - it was obvious, because you couldn't hear him yelling at a video game anymore. I shuffled upstairs, unsure of what he was doing. I wouldn't want to interrupt him if he was editing - because the tedious process occasionally made him temperamental, I always steered clear to keep myself off of his nerves. When a glance into the recording room told me that he was not working at all, but in fact on his phone, I knew I was safe to approach him.

"Hey, Mark."

"What is it?" He didn't look up, distracted by the screen. It reflected a small square of bluish light off of his glasses, but I couldn't tell exactly what he was doing. I was lucky I was able to talk to him - these days, he was almost always either working or out, doing something with friends or acquaintances or fans. 

"I'd like to go to the library... and it's too far to walk."

"So? The car keys are on the counter, if that's what you're wondering."

"Um. There's a small problem with that. The problem being that I can't drive." Did Mark just forget? Most people knew how to drive; did it just slip his mind that I didn't?

"What do you mean, you can't drive?" Mark finally looked up, at least slightly, so that his reddish fringe covered most of his eyes. "You have a driver's license. One that we know isn't fake, because you got it directly from the government. Sam, my friend, I'm pretty sure you can drive."

"Um. There's an issue in that I've never touched the steering wheel of a car before. Not to drive, not to learn to drive. Not ever. I think that probably means that I don't know how?" I shifted my posture, nervous. Mark had a point. Why would I have a driver's license if I couldn't drive a car?

Mark gave me an odd expression, one of consideration, one of contemplating. After a moment, he finally responded. "Fine. I'll go to the library with you. But you're driving - at least until you scare me into believing that you can't. Now go get the keys, and I'll meet you in the driveway."

"What?! But that's so stupid! You don't give someone who isn't confident with their driving skills the car keys!" 

But Mark wasn't having any of it. He stood up to exit the room. "Believe it. I'm a stupid person," and I was left to argue with silence.

-

The car keys jingled ominously in my grip as I walked out to the driveway. Mark was standing there, beside the passenger door, leaning against the side of the sedan as if he didn't have a care in the world. "Unlock it," he instructed, and my hand shook with the keys, a rolling thunder of the high metal pitch. I held them up to the car, and the car immediately responded with a happy chirp that was far too dissonant against my mood.

Mark opened his door, and it made the sort of clunking sound that all car doors make. I stared at the car for a moment in dismay, the sunlight reflecting off of the dark exterior in a bright show of blue, a rainbow of colors contained in a single shade, bright and cheerful and too much like the sedan's chirp. I approached the driver's seat, and watched as my hand gripped the handle and the door made the clunking sound and my body swung into the tan cushioning of the left side of the car. I should have relaxed when I hit the seat's back, but instead only grew more tense until my entire body would have registered as solid stone to anyone who cared to test it.

Mark had watched my stress climax and leaned over to comfort me. "Just take a deep breath," his low voice soothed, and I let it wash over me as I exhaled and let my stone back crumble into the driver's seat. "Now put the key into ignition, and turn."

The hand with the key moved towards the wheel against my own volition, and beneath me I heard the engine roar to life, a steady growl of speed and power and enthusiasm. And, my brain usefully reminded me, pain and fire and death. "Switch the gear into reverse," Mark said, but I didn't hear him, or perhaps wasn't listening; somehow, something within me already knew what to do, where to go, despite my panicked exterior. The car rolled backward into the street, and I was amazed to watch as it turned down the road and beyond, a feat all my own. 

"How?" I whispered to myself, as instinct pushed the car forward. Ingrained, was this skill; if I had tried to think about it consciously, I would have almost immediately crashed. But instead, the car drove straight and true, my hands at ten and two, and eventually I saw the brick walls of the public library in the distance, and I pulled into a parking space and pulled the handbrake with a triumphant finality.

"Yesssss," Mark was celebrating. "I don't mean to get all cliché on you, but I knew you could do it!"

"How did I do that." That was all I could say. It wasn't a statement, but I said it like one anyway. "I don't understand."

"Who the hell knows? I don't! I don't care! I don't have to drive you places anymore!" Mark was grinning with ecstasy. "Sam, you can really drive! Let's not have a party, though, I don't have time for that."

"Sure..." I wasn't really listening. I reached to leave the car, and began to meander toward the glass double doors of the library. Each had a five-pointed star painted in white, a comforting reminder that yes, this was a good place and yes, this was somewhere I was meant to be. Mark shadowed me, but I wasn't quite aware of him; and my hand met the star and the door opened me up into my aviary of books.

Shelves, shelves, shelves, shelves, shelves. Shelves full of never-ending novels and notes and nonfiction. It was like the diner, but infinitely better; instead of smelling like grease and gristle this place was doused in paper and leather and a faint whiff of paraffin. I wanted to laugh, to sing, to dance in this glory, but Mark's voice pulled me out of my trance before I could fully contemplate any of those. "You look like a kid in a candy shop," he laughed, and I honestly felt like a kid in a candy shop; there were so many books in this library that I could read and read and read for days, weeks, months, years at a time and never grow bored. 

A large wooden desk was off to the right; and a lady sat there, patiently; something about her reminded me of Pear Lady - perhaps it was the way her bun was twisted, or her spectacles. I approached her, and she smiled, a warm, gentle smile; the smile of someone who works with children, someone soft and sweet in demeanor. "How can I help you?" she asked helpfully, and she looked me in the eye, and for some reason I didn't shrink like I normally did.

"I would like a library card." And that was all I said, and I said it with a confidence that I doubt had ever graced my voice before, and the librarian smiled again, that warm, gentle, happy smile. I watched her open a drawer and rifle through papers, sorting them as she went, and soon enough placed three or four forms before me. "Fill these out, please," she recited, a process long since memorized. She handed me a pen, and I began on my quest to finish the papers.

The forms stretched, long and wordy, across the librarian's desk. Information, information, information. The only comparison I could make was to Pear Lady's paperwork at HESHE, and if I didn't have any sense I would have sworn up and down that this paper was longer. Name. Birthdate. Cell phone number. Jack McLoughlin, 11 December 1992, N/A. Copied straight from my driver's license, the repetitive motions of the pen in my hand putting me almost to sleep. The number SML006 primed in my head, ready for a question asking about the mysterious cipher. There wasn't one.

I was almost to the bottom of the form when I came across a question marked with an asterisk. Required. I touched the small star, smiling at its familiarity and its six directions, the ink presenting me with a tiny splash of joy against the monotone questionnaire. Recovery information, it read. First/last name and contact information recommended.

Mark, I thought. He was the only person I knew. I scrawled a phone number and email address. Name; what was Mark's surname? A musing brought up nothing, none of the happy information I was used to swimming around in the dark. Mark had never told me his last name. Frustration gnawed at me as I looked towards Mark browsing, wanting the recognition of his face to reiterate information I had never been given in the first place. I was gritting my teeth in annoyance when, out of the dark and unknowledged oblivion, the name Fischbach was brought up by my subconscious. The name sounded plausible - he must have told me at some point, and I'd forgotten. 

The pen finished the last downstroke of the h, and thus, I was finished with the form.

"Hey, Mark," I called him over. "Can you check this?" I didn't want to have miswritten anything, and so a second pair of eyes would be handy. I watched him shuffle toward the desk from the magazine rack where he had been standing the moment before. He picked up my form and scanned it, nodding slightly. He motioned to hand it back to me as he neared the bottom of the form. "This looks good to-" Suddenly, he froze, and his eyes narrowed.

His eyes narrowed from suspicion.

"Sam... How do you know my last name?"

My gut clenched. "What?"

"I know that I never told you it." His voice was low. "I've been very careful not to, this entire time. But here it is on this form, that you filled out, in your handwriting. How do you know it?"

"It just... it just sounded right, I don't know!" My voice quivered - this was not good. This would not convince Mark.

"Sam, you're a terrible liar," Mark growled, and my hands trembled. I wanted to yell, to scream, that I wasn't lying, that I didn't know! But Mark wouldn't believe me.

I tried to come up with something, anything, to explain it. I fished deep into my subconscious, but pulled up nothing over and over again. I tried to form a guess in my head, to morph it into words - "I must have heard it on the... Internet? Somewhere? I mean, you're like a celebrity, right?" but I knew it wasn't convincing and Mark knew it wasn't convincing and he held me there, stuck to the library carpet, with his dark gaze, cold and metallic and needly until I followed the urge to cough simply to break the silence.

"I'm keeping an eye on you, Sam." he said, as he walked toward the double glass doors that marked the exit. "I'll be at the car."

As I handed the filled application to the librarian, her gaze still patient and gentle, a cold snake slithered up my spine. If he had never told me, then how did I know Mark's last name? 

I left the library, and the double doors swung shut behind me with a chilly muffled thunk.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mark discovers an impersonator.

"Sam!" A shout from Mark. This was not the kind of shouting I could hear vaguely from the recording room daily; this was not a shout of dramatic frustration or realization of stupidity. This was not the shout that I heard from Mark so frequently, in response to whatever it was the computer presented him. No, this was a shout like the ones he made out in the mountains, finding me out on the side of the road in the dirt and the sun and the shadeless eternity. This was the shout, marred by confusion and fury and fear, that made me fear Mark the first time. That kept me from ever trusting him completely.

I shrank into the corner of the guest room. The pale walls did nothing to caress me, or dampen my fear; perhaps, you could say, they worsened it, skyrocketed it into an oblivion beyond my understanding. I felt water around my eyes, down my cheeks - whether it was sweat or tears or both, I could not begin to tell. My eyes squeezed shut, trying to block out the world, block out everything that was coming crashing down around me until "Sam!" came again from Mark, worried this time, and his tone softened and his face softened and I opened my eyes to see him standing above the bed holding a smartphone. "Sam! I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to scare you! Shit, I always forget just how goddamn sensitive you are - no offense." 

"None taken?" I heard my voice quiver and crack, trying to release all the tension that my body had endured in just two, small, insignificant words. Mark squatted down next to the bed, and offered a hand of reassurance. I realized I had curled up into a tight ball in the corner and relaxed, letting my body sink into the memory foam of the mattress. I hadn't realized that I had been holding my breath and finally exhaled, letting the air escape from my lungs and into the room at large before waving halfheartedly at Mark. "What's going on, anyhow?"

He glanced down at the smartphone and grimaced, from disgust or confusion or awkwardness or something else entirely. He held the phone toward me. "Have you heard of a 'Merlin Fischbach?'"

Black hair, short height, rectangular glasses. My heart leaped into my throat when I realized that the photo was a picture of Dark Eyes, and that he looked exactly like Mark.

-

I stared at Mark, then the phone, then back at Mark again. Connections making themselves in my head, before I even had time to fully process them. I stammered something intelligible; I was gripping the bed, every bit of tension returned. 

That's why Mark looked so familiar. That's why I recognized his surname, even before I had any way of knowing it. It was the same face from HESHE, the same name from Merlin's identity card. The same man as the very first person that ever punctured its way into my fuzzy awareness.

Eventually I managed to say something, words shaky and unsure. "How the... how the hell?!"

Mark gritted his teeth. "This... this kid showed up on the Internet a couple weeks ago, apparently. He's been claiming that he's 'Darkiplier' and the Web's gone absolutely berserk about it. Spam about him's making it into my comments now, even. He's just a stupid teenage impersonator, but, as I'm sure you can tell..."

I gave the photograph another good look. He didn't look exactly like Mark, I realized - he looked like, well, sixteen-year-old Mark. Prepubescent. His jaw, his nose, his eyes - they all were Mark's, just younger and softer and slightly more awkward-looking. He had grown out his hair since the last time I'd seen him. It was now almost as long as Mark's, if not longer, and dyed a deep red. He had a new pair of glasses, thin and wire-framed and far more severe than the chunky plastic things HESHE had given him. He was wearing dark clothes - a grey-and-maroon hoodie and black skinny jeans. His resemblance to Mark was still undeniable.

"That's... that's Merlin?" Shock. That was all I could muster.

"So you know him?" Was that hopefulness or suspicion in Mark's tone?

"Sort of? Not really?" How did I answer this? It's not like I'd ever had a real conversation with the kid. "He was at the facility place that I came from before you found me. Neither of us were really inclined to social interaction at the time. I don't know anything about him, really. Besides his name, that is."

Mark scratched the stubble under his chin, contemplating. I felt a terrible uneasiness crawling deep in my gut that he didn't really believe me, that he never really believed me. I knew that some part of him still greatly suspected me - of what, I could never guess.

He seemed to be staring off into the distance when he finally spoke once more. "In a week, I'm leaving for PAX West," he commented. "Sam, I want you to come with me."

I quirked an eyebrow, surprised at the change of subject. "What?"

"It's a gaming convention I go to every year. I was assuming you were going to stay in LA while I was gone, but..." he trailed off, looking for the right words. "...I think it might be a better idea for you to come, too."

"Okay...?" I knew Mark would be leaving in a week, and I had assumed it was for work. No need for me to come along. "What business would I have at... at PAX?"

"I just... I think it would be a good idea." Steadfast, stubborn. This was a rare appearance of a rare side of Mark. "You good with that?"

"I guess?" What could I say?

"Hold on, then. I need to find a last-minute plane ticket."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It should be noted that this fic was written before A Date with Markiplier so canon Darkiplier has no bearing or relation to the story.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam freaks out at the airport.

I was stranded in a sea of bodies, grey and white and black and neon pink and brown and tan and grey again. It rushed around me, flooding my senses with sound and light and heat and the odd, tarnished scent of perfume. I was trapped in a cage, a huge cage, an enormous cage full of people and suitcases and sleek black conveyor belts slicking their way around, through the depths of an infinite building with infinite walls. It was all grey, but it was all not; there were so many sounds and colors hurled inexplicably through the room that it struck me as a very garish portrayal of this society I had entered, and I was easily overwhelmed by the sheer extent of this odd world.

"Welcome," said Mark, "to Los Angeles International Airport."

"What the hell."

"We're looking for Delta Flight 114 to Seattle, Washington."

"What the hell."

"Sam, are you listening?"

"Why are there so many people?"

"Oh." I saw Mark fidget nervously. "Um, Sam, I forgot to mention that, um... yeah, there are a lot of people at the airport. And on the airplane. And on this whole trip in general."

"Why did I agree to this, again?" but he didn't respond, and I could see nothing but myself drowning in an ocean of people, bodies, corpses? Breathless, airless, lifeless, lost in the depths of this strange infinite place forever, slipping along in through the stomach of the conveyor belt creature. I was frozen to the ground, nothing but a statue in this endlessly moving world. 

I saw Mark reach for my hand, and I jumped away from him as if he were burning, burning bright and hot and red just like his freshly-dyed hair. "What the hell?" I was suddenly questioning Mark's intentions, now unsteady and unsure.

But instead of blushing or smiling, Mark growled. "Come on. The line is over there, and we're going to be late." He finally grabbed my hand and proceeded to drag me through the crowd, dodging and weaving past people, people, people, bodies, bodies, bodies. I felt an incredible temptation to close my eyes, shut the world out, take myself to a place as far away as possible, but then I'd run into someone and that was a prospect far worse. 

We had finally reached what could be construed as a vague sort of line when a sudden cry of, "Oh my god, it's MARK!" echoed across the lobby, and I watched him quirk his head to see a pair of girls, teenagers perhaps. He grinned that goofy and genuine Mark grin, and it masked any sense of airport annoyance he was otherwise battling. 

He fidgeted before shuffling away from me awkwardly. "Fans. Um, hold our spot, okay?" and he disappeared into the crowd, leaving me alone in this strange, urban world. I tensed, feeling the travelers around me stretch and heighten, suddenly towering miles above my head as if they were skyscrapers. I was small, insignificant, and abandoned, left here by Mark in this maelstrom of overwhelming sound and color to be bombarded by oddities I had no part in choosing.

"Delta Flight 298 to Phoenix, Arizona will be departing in 15 minutes," an announcement blared, and I was snapped back to reality. I saw Mark jogging back to me, cutting through the line in a hurry, smiling all the while stumbling over overstuffed black suitcases and rigid blue trunks.

"Sorry about that," he panted as he reached our spot in line once again. "I always try to at least say 'Hi' to fans I meet out and about. It gives me these warm fuzzies, y'know? And people seem to like it."

"Yeah," I muttered, not quite paying full attention. The line inched forward, and we inched forward with it, trapped in this slow cycle of luggage processing and noise. I watched as Mark shifted nervously beside me, glancing at his watch every few seconds. He was stiff and tense, and I was soon acutely aware of how close we were cutting it. 

"Our plane is boarding in less than twenty minutes," Mark hissed uncomfortably to himself, but the line still stretched for an eternity in front of us. "A twenty minutes we are going to spend in line before we even hit security."

I could feel his watch ticking, thumping, breathing down my neck from its place on his arm beside me, and each time I felt its pulse I was driven more and more stressed, a tension amid the tension amid the chaos of this odd commuter world, and I was on the brink of breaking when finally, finally, I heard someone from behind the counter shout, "If you're to board Delta Flight 114 to Seattle, Washington, come to the front, please!"

I heard Mark exhale happily beside me, and he grinned as he picked up his suitcase. "C'mon! Maybe we'll actually catch this damn flight!" and I forced myself to laugh at his comment, and all of a sudden I felt so much more relaxed, the dysphoria around me meaningless as I cut through the line behind my companion.

The people behind the counter took our luggage, gave us some papers - boarding passes, they said - and we were off, whisking away from the one horrid line and into, I soon realized, another. 

"Security," Mark growled. "Annoying, but definitely necessary. See those people in black uniforms? Those are TSA officers, and they're making sure that we don't get on a plane with a terrorist." I sighed, resigning myself to missing our flight. The line was moving faster than the previous, however, and while the time pressure was present it wasn't pounding me into the ground like before. The front of the line rushed quickly towards us and soon we were at one of the officer's desks, and she signed our passes, and we were flung into a flurry of every kind of scanner imaginable. The motion around me suddenly blurred; I saw Mark flinging a carry-on onto a conveyor, stepping into a scanner, and I followed him as I was waved through.

There was a moment of silence, a terribly excruciating silence. I was tense, afraid, as the scanner spun around me, and finally I was let out the other end and back into the chaos world. The officer at the other end was looking at me skeptically, and I wanted to shrink. 

"We need to pat you down."

"What? Why?" Mark. "He's clearly got nothing on him." And that was true; I was wearing nothing more than a slightly-too-small borrowed T-shirt and jeans. But the officer shook his head - "the rules are the rules" - and proceeded to show me how to stand so that he could properly inspect me, and I stood there stiffly, afraid of the physical contact.

He didn't find anything - there was nothing to find - but was obviously confused anyway. He stared at the picture on his monitor, and called another officer over. "Hey, Shannon!" and a dark-haired woman walked towards us. "Take a look at this."

She studied it, contemplating. After a moment, she asked, "And he doesn't have anything on him?"

"No, nothing at all. It's odd." 

She nodded to herself, before looking back up at me. "Sir, have you had surgery in recent memory? In the upper-left shoulder area?"

"Um." What kind of a question was that? But before I could answer, I heard Mark interrupt hurriedly.

"Yes! Yes, he has! He's been recovering quite well, actually!" He was grinning awkwardly, buckling from the stress and the situation, but the two TSA officers didn't seem to notice.

The dark-haired officer, Shannon, shrugged at her companion. "That explains it. You two are good to go," and smiled gently toward us. "I hope your recovery continues to go smoothly." 

As we walked away from the security checkpoint, I glanced at Mark. "What do you think that was about?"

He shook his head, staring at his feet. "I saw the monitor when you came out of the scanner. There's something weird in your left shoulder. Like, metal, and electronic. Stuff that's not in people's shoulders."

"An identification chip?" I asked, running my hand over the smooth skin at the back of my neck, suddenly distrusting my very own body. 

"Something like that," he mused. "But you don't have a scar there. How would there be a chip?"

Silence. We approached the gate, seeing the jets lined up in rows through the double-paned windows, the passengers lined up in clumps and clusters. We were just in time, I realized - between the lines and the TSA, we had used all twenty minutes. My boarding pass trembled in my hand, and Mark saw my apprehension.

"Just think. Tomorrow, we'll be at PAX, and we won't have to worry about any of this!" He sounded tired, but I heard a hint of excitement beneath the facade. "It'll be... great."

Tomorrow, I thought, and sighed.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam meets an uncanny stranger.

**PAX, the next afternoon**   
  


Two pairs of footsteps echoed down the corridor as Mark exited the stage from his panel. He had left me in a private room today with a stash of books to read, knowing that I had no interest in his panel and would only be lost in the chaos that was the rest of the convention. I had devoured a third of  _Life of Pi_  in the mere hour of the panel - after all, it was a good book - and was expecting Mark to show up to check in with me, but had heard nothing about him bringing someone else along.

I tried to look as busy reading as possible as the footsteps approached the closed door, and heard a fragment of Mark's conversation as they approached - "Well, Jack, there's someone I think you should meet."

_That's a little odd_ , I thought, but then again, "Jack" was a fairly common name. A mere coincidence that we had the same alias - perhaps this was why Mark insisted on calling me Sam? It would make more sense than anything. In those first few moments, I just shrugged it off.

The door opened, and I hid behind  _Life of Pi_ , not inclined to the social interaction Mark seemed to favor. But I couldn't hide when addressed directly. "Hey, Sam."

I looked up, and for a moment, the room was filled with sweet, tantalizing silence - until comprehension hit me, and him, the stranger; the only words that could sum up my thought process right then were blurted by him when realization dawned on us: _"Holy shit."_

-

I've heard an idiom before about tension - that sometimes, it's so thick you can cut it with a knife. But the tension in the room that day, couldn't have been cut with the sharpest of cleavers. It couldn't have been cut by anything, not until Mark pierced it with his words.

"Uhh, Jack, this is... This is Jack McLoughlin, but we call him Sam? Because, well, y'know..."

And, _boy,_ did I know! I was looking straight into a mirror. The man before me was exactly the same as the face the bathroom presented to me every morning, save for a few superficial details. Jack, as he was called by Mark, had a bit of a beard and his hair dyed a vivid lime green, but his appearance otherwise was exactly the same, small and white and frail just like me, just like me, just like _him_. And his eyes, _my_ eyes, a deep crystalline ocean blue I had only ever seen in one other place in the world, one other place in the universe.

I could tell by his reaction, the way his mouth quirked, the way his brow folded in onto itself, that he was having trouble processing this odd turn of events as well, and we were held in our unprecedented silence until the green man shattered it into a thousand glittering pieces with six simple words. "How in the fookin' _hell,_ Mark?!"

And his voice. Oh, his voice. He had an Irish accent, and clearly had spent much more time speaking, shouting, _screaming_ than I did, but his voice was exactly the same. Rough and light and tenor-pitched, so different from Mark's deep smooth baritone.

I wasn't sure if I was supposed to say anything, or shake his hand, or what, and so sat there awkwardly and attempted to break the silence with a feeble, "Well, hello..."

-

_Well. This is a rather unusual turn of events.  
_  
That's what the green man, Jack, said. What he meant to say. What I thought he meant to say. Really, what I wanted to say, but I didn't, and my words were left unspoken.

"What's your deal, man?" His voice, my voice, our voice jumped at me, sharpened like a knife; I couldn't look at him, I couldn't look at  _myself_ ; I was me, so who was he? Mark was there, but not really; hair red and face red and eyes decidedly  _not_ red; and I remembered Merlin, Dark Eyes, and how he looked like him. But this man, this Green Man Jack, didn't just  _look like me._ Green Man Jack  _was_ me, every feature aligned, the same, far more alike than any identical twins would hope to be but for a pint of green dye and an accent.

"Mark," I gasped. This was what Mark was hiding, what he knew. What he was afraid to tell me, why he was afraid at all. And now I was afraid, too, and betrayed. "Mark, I... I can't..."

_I can't handle this. I can't explain this. I can't process this, I can't understand this. I can't find any words to describe this._

__It all made sense. It all made _so much sense._ But it didn't make sense, it didn't make _any_ sense, and I turned to look at Jack again, and cringed, and his voice came up again, the bladed "Who  _are_  you?" cutting deep into my soul, shredding me into a thousand little bloody metaphorical pieces. I quivered.

"First that Darkiplier kid, now  _this?_ Mark, I..." He swallowed, holding something in, something that I knew too well; something teary and bleary and very much confused. Not angry, or malicious, but  _afraid_.

Afraid of  _me_.

"Jack?" I guessed, only half-coherent. "Why do you look like me?" 

It was a stupid question. It was the  _stupidest_ of questions, and I knew it. A question that only the smallest of small children would ask, and I asked it anyway, and I didn't care, or I  _didn't_ , until "Why do I look like you?" Jack snapped. "Why do I look like you? Why the fuck do  _you_  look like  _me_?"

Mark buried his head in his hands, and I realized that there was a call that I needed to make.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam has an unsatisfying Skype call with Merlin.

"Hel- _lo_  there, mortal. You are one of a  _lucky few_ to get a private Skype call with the  _one,_ the  _only_ , Darkiplier, next ruler of my universe and yours. What would you like to say to your new king?"  
  
"You don't get many Skype calls, do you?"  
  
It had been easy finding Merlin's Skype. Ridiculously easy, in fact - he had posted it all over all of his social media, bold and underlined and italicized, apparently with no sense of personal privacy.  _GET A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY! TALK TO DARKIPLIER, LIVE AND IN THE FLESH (BUT NOT REALLY!)_ He really was, as Mark had put it, desperate for attention. And man, attention he got - but it didn't seem like the attention he'd been getting was exactly what he had expected. No publicity was bad publicity, as they say, but somehow I still found myself questioning Merlin's clearly _spectacular_ judgement.  
  
"What are  _you_ calling me for?" He cracked an eye open on the video call, trying to hide his surprise. He was attempting to smirk, but it wasn't working and instead his mouth twisted into a strange shape that made him look more sick than intimidating. I watched him fidget nervously, very self-aware but unable to fix it.   
  
"Why do you think?" I raised an eyebrow. "I met Jack."  
  
"Jack... Jacksepticeye Jack?" and his failed smirk disappeared, replaced by a real one. He was leaning back in his chair, and I watched as he fought with himself, trying not to laugh, a hint of a snicker engraved into the folds of his face.  
  
"Yes. Jacksepticeye Jack." That was his alias, Mark had told me - just as he was Markiplier, and Merlin was Darkiplier, Green Man Jack was Jacksepticeye.  
  
"You didn't know about  _Jacksepticeye?_ Not this  _entire time?"_  His attempts were failing now, and he buckled over, laughing. "Kid, how did you not know about  _Jacksepticeye?"  
  
_ "Don't call me a kid. I'm older than you," I retorted, but almost reconsidered with Merlin reprimanding me. "And how was I to know who Jack was? He lives in Ireland, doesn't he? I've been in L.A. this whole time!"  
  
"But you know who  _Markiplier_ is," Merlin laughed. "You've  _got_  to, to know where to find me. And Jack's, like, Mark's best friend.  _How have you not heard of Jacksepticeye?_ "  
  
Jack was one of Mark's closest friends? I had lived with Mark for weeks. Why hadn't he told me? Why did he keep such a huge important fact such a huge important secret? It stung, it really did. My only friend in this huge, lonely world had tried his hardest to keep something so important, so crucial to my very  _existence,_  so far from me for so long. I buried my head in my hands, almost against my will.  _"What the hell, Mark?"  
  
_ It was just barely a whisper, but Merlin heard it anyway. "What?" Confusion. Basic confusion, the foundry of every one of my experiences these days, it seemed - confusion and intrusion and murderous secrets around every bend in the road.  
  
I was done, I decided; I was done with this crud, this crap, this  _total bullshit_ that was the frequent serial killer plot twist and occasional arrogant teenage impostor, and I slammed my hand onto the desk in an explosion of sheer annoyance, praying that Merlin could calm me down, explain things, make me feel better as the only human in the world I had any way to relate to. "Why the  _hell_ didn't he tell me about Jack?"   
  
But Merlin was, apparently, annoyed as well. "Why the hell didn't  _who_  tell you about Jack?" he snapped, and I could sense the dark fire in his dark eyes burning, burning, burning me to a crisp.  
  
"Mark, of course! Who the hell did you think?" I glared at Merlin through the monitor in an effort to douse the flames. His eyebrows were quirked into an odd sort of frown, an expression I had never seen on his face before, and it didn't fit his features well, contorting them at odd and awkward angles.  
  
"Why would... why would Mark have told you anything? It's not like you've ever seen him! I highly doubt he has any idea you even exist! I'd hate to defend him, but how the hell is it  _his_  fault?" Merlin was growling through the screen, akin to a disturbed dog, and I realized through my betrayal breakdown that he hadn't been clued in to a crucial, crucial,  _crucial_  detail.  
  
"I  _live_  with Mark, you dumbass! I've lived with Mark for a  _month!"  
  
_ Surprise. Shock. Embarrassment? Merlin's face flickered through a thousand emotions in that first moment, but I looked away and when I dared look again his dark eyes had set themselves firmly in the realm of calculation. He was grinning slightly to himself, a dark smirk that all but revealed the gears spinning wildly in his head. "Doesn't sound like he cares for you, much, then," he finally concluded, running his fingers through his hair in a manner that was far too nonchalant to be believable. What was he trying to convince me of? Whatever it was, I didn't buy it.  
  
"Shut up." I snapped, and suddenly recalled everything I'd seen of Merlin on the Internet; everything dumb and ignorant and rude and just plain  _stupid_ that had been circulating for weeks. "You don't know  _anything_ about Mark, other than that he's famous enough for you to steal his audience. Relying on other people's hard work just to get anywhere? You're such an... you're such an  _asshole_ , Merlin. So  _shut up_ until you have something worthwhile to say!"  
  
"Sorry," the teenager sneered, not seeming to care. "But I've got to earn my name  _somehow_. 'Darkiplier,' right?"  
  
I shook my head in exasperation, brown hair obscuring my view of the screen. "I  _thought_ you'd have something useful to say about this stupid mess! Advice, maybe, since you're dealing with the same junk as I am. But  _no,_  you turn out to be even  _more_  of a stupid idiot kid than I could've ever guessed you were!"  
  
"You're wasting my time. I've got a life to live, being  _famous_ and all. Goodbye, Jack."  
  
"It's  _Sam!"_ I hissed at the laptop, but he'd already ended the call, leaving me to quarrel with silence, and grapple with the truth - the truth that the only other person even remotely like me in this terrible, terrible world wasn't just my polar opposite, but a total jerk as well; the truth that Mark couldn't bear to even tell me about his closest friend, the closest friend that was truly so much like me; the truth that I knew absolutely nothing about this stupid, stupid world, and no one dared to tell me. Between Merlin, Jack, and Mark... between everything that I could remember happening, I really was alone. But I couldn't bear the truth alone.  
  
"God _dammit,_ Merlin," I whispered to the room, but the room did not respond.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Mark talk things out.

The empty hotel room expanded around me, somehow echoing into a symphony of silence, so quiet and yet so loud that I could only barely stand it. All I could hear was my own breathing, my own breathing against the quietness and the beige and the billowy burgundy bedspread. The room opened up on me, as if ready to tap into unexplored agoraphobia, and I closed my eyes in an attempt to wash away the loneliness.

I heard the air system kick on, an over-welcome low hum against the empty beige walls, and sighed. The room snapped back into place, and I let my eyes scan the perimeter, finally falling onto the mess that was Mark's pile of luggage, black and red and plaid with an occasional sock thrown in for good measure.

I hadn't seen my red-haired friend since PAX. After the encounter with Jack, he had just called a taxi to take me back here. Upon my arrival, I tried my hand at calling Merlin - and evidently lost when he hung up on me. It was then that the silence set in as I waited for my companion to return.

I had no idea how long it had been. I could have gotten up and checked, but I didn't feel the need to - after all, knowing just  _exactly_ how long Mark had left me, abandoned, would not make him reappear any faster. All I could tell was that it was dark outside - though the curtains were shut, they were slightly translucent and let an inkling of the light level through.

I heard the door beep, and Mark walked in, head hanging in exhaustion as he shut the door and slumped over on the opposite bed, his face burrowed in the blankets. For a moment, I just stared at him, tracing his features and frame where they stood out against the dark duvet, until the silence he too had brought with him became too overwhelming and forced me to break it.

"Mark?"

"Leave me alone." The response was muffled by the sheets, but I could hear it in his voice anyway. Exasperation. I turned away to the opposite wall and let my thoughts wander, wander into an oblivion of PAX and Merlin and Mark and Jack.

Jack. Jack. Jack.  _Jack_. How long had Mark known? The whole time, it seemed apparent; he had recognized me in the desert, wasn't that why? So why did I have a doppelganger? Or was  _I_ the doppelganger, like Merlin?

If Mark had known for so long, why didn't he say anything? To me, to Jack? What about Merlin, what was with him?

My head was spinning with questions, questions,  _too many questions_ , and I couldn't keep quiet, not any longer. "Why didn't you  _tell_ me?"

Mark was silent for a moment, and at first I thought he might've been asleep; but then I heard his voice, low and quiet, from across the small hotel room. "I thought you knew..."

"That's a load of crap!" He knew, I  _knew_  he knew I didn't know, didn't know about Jack, and I felt the silence he left then, a cold wet cloud of pure, straight guilt. He sat up, and I watched him shake his head slowly, tiredly, apologetically?

"I don't know... I guess I thought that if I didn't say anything... If I didn't say anything, the problem would... I dunno."

"If you didn't say anything, the problem would go away? Solve itself?" I sighed. "Mark, I  _know_  you know that's not how it works! Not with-" I gestured wildly toward myself, toward the room, though he was turned away from me and wouldn't have seen it. "-not with  _me!_  Not with  _this!"_

__"Shut _up,_ Sam." Mark growled, his voice dangerously low. "I just spent  _three hours_ trying to calm Jack down. I can't have you getting here on my case  _too!"_

__"Um, excuse me? _You_ brought this on yourself.  _You're_ the one who didn't tell anyone! You're the one keeping secrets and not telling your freaking  _roommate_  or even your  _best fucking friend_  that they're  _identical twins!"_

For a sweet, exhilarating moment, I thought I had won. My explosion of nerve, while perhaps more than a slight overreaction, was not at all unprecedented, and Mark knew it. A moment of silence, just me and my breathing and the air system, until Mark's low, low, quiet voice broke the silence one final time. "Sam... Just, just  _leave,_  will you?"

I stood there looking at him, shocked. Mark  _never_ got like this, got this mad. When Mark got mad, he got loud, not this shaky quiet ticking time-bomb. "Fine!" I hissed, and left the room, the door shutting behind me with an uneasy  _click_.

-

The damp chill of the evening Seattle air bit at my nose, ears, hands; my breath billowed out in a white fog as I sat, in uncomfortable silence, in a crouch by the hotel pool. Underlit, it glowed an unnatural cyan, and that combined with the odd-looking plastic plants that encircled the pool gave the entire pool deck an odd, futuristic vibe. I shivered from the cold, wearing nothing more than a thin turtleneck; I had left in too much of a hurry to even consider bringing a jacket along.

"Hey." A familiar voice above me. Mark looked down, offered a hand; there was a card in his hand, and it had the hotel's name written across it, along with a bar code. "You forgot your room key."

I took the card from him, and turned it over in contemplation. We let the silence hang between us, an awkward reminder of the argument, and I heard Mark sigh as he crouched down to sit beside me.

The pool glowed, and that was all I noticed for a moment, until Mark finally spoke again. "You know, that day I found you in the mountains, I really didn't know what to make of you."

I didn't say anything in response, and for a fraction of a second thought that Mark had finished his thought, until I saw him inhale to start again. "You looked like Jack, that much was obvious. You looked  _too much_ like Jack. I get incidental similarities, but carbon copies? I tried to convince myself you were an impersonator, an impostor; but no impersonator, no matter how hard they try, looks  _that_ close to the real thing. And an impersonator of Jack wouldn't be clean-shaven or brown-haired. Anyone would know that much.

"It got even weirder as I began talking to you. You had no idea who I was, or who Jack was. I thought you might be acting, but it was clear you weren't. Plus your  _name_. Your name wasn't right."

"What do you mean?" 

"Jack's name isn't actually Jack. It's Seán. Seán William McLoughlin. He's only known as Jack because of YouTube - people called him Jack because of his alias, and it stuck. By what I can only assume was crazy coincidence, you ended up with his nickname. And, well, his last name. But I wonder if his last name was really a coincidence."

 

I watched the pool's edge lap at my feet for a moment, and felt the heat of the underwater lights radiating from the surface of the water. Mark was staring at the pool too, but I couldn't tell if he was actually watching it or if he was just staring off into space. "I didn't choose my last name," I finally interjected, and Mark bit his lip.

"So you chose the name Jack?" he asked, and I nodded. "Why? Why 'Jack?'"

"I don't know. It sounded right," I said, recalling the small metal jack I had found that fateful day. It still rested in its place with my manila envelope, beside the bed in the guest room Mark had finally provided me in replacement for the original couch. Every once in a while, I would take it out and inspect it, watch the light refract from its six knobbed points; something about the shape of it pleased me. I couldn't tell you why.

I leaned back against the pool deck, enjoying the feel of the relatively warm pavement against my cold back, and stared up at the universe spiraling out above me into a map of space and stardust. The whole sky seemed to glimmer, inviting me into twinkling heavens I would never reach.

"Look up there," I murmured, gesturing up vaguely at the stars above, and Mark took my cue, following my gaze up. I saw him smile.

"See that _X_ there?" He pointed to a cross of 7 stars, perched perfectly atop the center of the highest point of the sky. One of the stars was significantly brighter than the rest, shimmering above in a fiery exclamation of distance and darkness.

"Cygnus?" I guessed, remembering the star charts I had seen mapped across the back of library atlases. September, in the Northern Hemisphere, the constellation should have been right there at the top of the heavens.

"The swan, yeah. Used to be my favorite constellation when I was a little kid." He smiled again faintly, reminiscing. "I've always been fascinated by space, I guess... one day, I'd love to be an astronaut or something."

 

"Why don't you go for it, then?"

 

He shook his head and sighed. "With YouTube... I  _love_ YouTube, I don't know if I could just leave. And even if it ended, or I quit... the chances of me going to space are still pretty slim. But one day... Maybe, one day..."

I didn't say anything after that, and for a few minutes we just let the world be our conversation, the lapping of pool water and the faint whistle of a slight breeze and the distant hum of cars on a highway forming a symphony for our audience; that is, until the night chill nipped me just barely too hard and we stood up to return to our hotel room, exhausted from our conversation and our day and our lives.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mark discovers something unnerving about Sam.

"Hey, Sam. C'mere, would you?"

I had been reading in my room that morning, deeply engrossed in a novel by Pratchett, when Mark's voice had called across the house. Despite my previous preoccupation, I was inclined to follow it, and found Mark sitting at the kitchen counter. He was holding what looked like could've been a large calculator, except that it was wider at on end than the other and had no keys. "What's that?" 

"It's Chica's microchip scanner. I just found it. I was thinking that we could use it to see what's on that chip of yours."

"What?" my hand instinctively reached up to brush the spot on my shoulder where I imagined it was implanted, buried deep beneath skin and flesh and blood. "Would that work?"

"I have no idea. I mean, theoretically, yes, if it's like a normal RFID chip, but... who knows. It might not be a chip at all - you never know. You don't have a scar, after all."

"Um." Uncomfortable with that thought, I shifted my gaze away from the scanner in Mark's hands to a spot of dust on the wall. It had been hard enough to accept that I had been microchipped - if it was something else entirely, I knew I wouldn't be able to handle it. "Let's just say it's a chip, alright?"

Mark shrugged. "Until we've got proof otherwise, sure." He shifted the scanner to his right hand and crouched down on the floor. "You okay with this?"

"Yeah." As much as I hated the fact that someone had tampered with me who knew when for who knew what reason, there was a certain, albeit rebellious, part of me that was more than a little curious as to the chip's purpose. Ever since that unfortunate trip to the airport, I had been more than a little curious as to the function of the assumed-to-be-microchip.

I squatted next to Mark, and then shifted to a kneeling position. He closed his eyes and exhaled. "Okay. Take off your shirt."

_"What?!"_

"Jesus Christ, chill! I just don't know if the scanner will be able to read through it! Normally, it should, but since your chip or whatever it is is really, really deep, I want to remove as much interference as possible. This scanner's only designed to read something directly under the skin. Nobody puts a chip more than, like, a quarter inch deep, but yours has to be at least two or three inches down, since you can't tell that it's there at all from the surface."

And that was how I reluctantly obliged, too tired to argue with his admittedly-solid logic. The turtleneck I had been previously wearing was thrown haphazardly to the side by Mark's predictably oh-so-neat throw, and I heard the scanner's electronic beep as Mark turned it on.

I squeezed my eyes shut. What could possibly be on the chip? It had clearly been part of whatever experiment I had been involved in. Why was it implanted, and why was it buried so deeply in my shoulder? And it had to be big, since the TSA had found it, so how could I possibly not have a scar? I buried my head in my hands, unhappy and uncomfortable until "Okay. Ready?" from my compatriot, and just like that, Mark's voice broke me out of my thoughts.

I let out the breath I had been holding in and tried to relax, letting my tension evaporate like morning condensation. "Do it. Now, before I chicken out."

I felt the cold, hard plastic of the back of the scanner touch my back, and held my breath as Mark moved it slowly over my back. I could feel it, crackling with electricity and potential, pounding against me, interrogating something within me that I didn't even know existed. Moments turned into eons turned into eternities until finally, finally, finally I heard that telltale beep of the device, felt Mark's hand grip my bare shoulder in surprise, heard him gasp. 

"Holy... holy shit, Sam."

"What?" I turned around as Mark released his grip on me, and saw him staring at the scanner, paging through slowly, slowly, quickly. 

"This..."

He handed me the scanner, and I heard him shift to a position behind me, peering over my shoulder. I squinted, trying to make out the text on the the screen of the scanner, but I didn't understand a bit of it. It was all gibberish, random letters and numbers and slashes and symbols. "I don't get it. I can't read this - Are you sure that it worked? After all, the chip is awfully deep."

Mark shook his head. "No, it read it fine. It's just all encrypted. Which means, A, it's not an RFID chip, and B, there's something on that chip that someone doesn't want us to see."

My eyebrow twitched, and I continued to flip through pages, pages, pages of encryption, none of it making sense. "How was it picked up if it's not RFID?"

"I don't know. But it's government, right? They've got all sorts of weird tech that the rest of us happy normal people know absolutely nothing about. They probably developed some microchip technology that's close enough to RFID for the scanner but that can store a ton of encrypted, probably secret, information. Also, Sam, put your shirt back on."

I grabbed the grey heap from the floor and slipped inside, much more comfortable with that one piece more of metaphorical armor. "So why is that so surprising? Don't people encrypt most information?"

 

"Not on microchips. Usually you chip something - some _one,_  in this case - because there's important information about them that needs to be accessible in case of an emergency. Things like medical records, contact information, that kind of thing. I thought that that might be what this was for, and that whoever implanted it just did it weirdly, and it ended up way deeper down than they intended. But clearly, that's not the case."

I let his words hang, unanswered, as I continued to flip through line after line after line of gibberish, gibberish, gibberish, until...

"Wait," I said to myself. What had I seen? I skipped back a few lines, and there it was. A few lines more, and there it was again.

SML006. It was all over the data. Over, and over, and over, and over again.

"What is it?" Mark asked, studying the screen, and I realized he did not know of the odd number.

"See that cipher?" and I gestured to it, "I think that's an identification number of some kind. It was everywhere on the papers at HESHE, and now it's everywhere here, too."

Mark's brow furrowed, an odd expression of concentration that was uniquely his. He didn't respond, and I continued to flip through the encrypted data, back and back and even further back. Until, that is, the very first line.

The very first line wasn't encrypted. It was readable, and Mark saw it too.

"Property of the government of the United States of America," he read, quietly, shakily. "If found, please neutralize and contact authority figures immediately."

_"Property?"_ I whispered, unable to process, and Mark sat up behind me.

"Sam... Sam, this is really, really bad."

"They think I'm  _property?"_

And that time, there was no way for me to let the tension dissolve.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Jack get a very, very bad idea.

It was late one night, and I wasn't asleep. I didn't know what was wrong, but something was because I was lying awake, staring at the long, white boards that ceilinged the guest room in the blackness. The house was dark and silent - Mark had long since gone to bed. I had no idea what time it was and that only made it worse.

The room was silent. Very silent. An excruciating silence that pressed against me from all sides, eating me away in the dark. It was perhaps the silence that was wrong. The monster in the silence was crushing me, keeping me from sleep.

The events of the previous day were ever-present, ever-pressing, ever-watching, and I mulled them over in my head, trying to make sense of them for the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time, to no avail. The government had chipped me - I knew that already. They had chipped me with something secret, a secret trove of information they needed but wanted to hide, letting it sink deep beneath muscle, blood, and bone. But why? And why, after going to the trouble of hiding that information, why release me?

_Property_. It echoed in my head, the words twisting into something horrifying, and all of it - my thoughts, my fears - all were swallowed by the monster waiting in the quietness.

Skype pinged. A warm, orange sound piercing the enduring blackness. It didn't process at first, I was so grateful for the banishment of the silence monster. Until I realized that  _Skype pinged_.

Who could it be? It was God-knows-what-hour o'clock. Even night owls like Mark were asleep now. This was the time many had called the witching hour - nobody, absolutely nobody, was awake.

Except, I realized as I groped for the iPad, for one person. One person, off-scheduled in so many ways for so many years.

I opened Skype, and Jack's face stared back at me. I grimaced, still unused to how akin his features were to mine. "Hello?" I croaked groggily.

"Sam. Get over here, now."

"What?" I stared at the screen, not following through.

"I'm going to go to that organization headquarters that experimented on you or whatever it was they did, and you're coming with me. Right now."

"Um. You are over five thousand miles away from me, at the moment, my friend."

"What?" Jack's whole face quirked up in confusion, until something I could only assume was akin to realization hit. "Mark didn't tell you? I'm in L.A. for a week. Filming, and whatever."

 

"Mark doesn't... talk about you," I sighed, glancing away from the tablet. Even if Mark _had_ told me Jack was in town, I probably would've forgotten about it anyway - or rather, purposefully blocked it from my mind. After all, Jack wasn't a fan of me. Our differences, or rather lack of differences, had turned him away from me from the start, and my quiet and antisocial nature only made it worse. Given, I wasn't much of a fan of him either - he was too rambunctious, not serious enough, not predictable. I could never guess what he would do next, and I didn't like that, and he didn't like me, and we mutually agreed to stay out of each other's way. Mark, I knew, respected that, and had refrained from the subject. "It just makes it weird. I'm sure I make it weird for you guys, too."

"Eh." Jack shrugged. "We don't really mention you, but Mark's usually more transparent than that. Maybe not with you, I guess. But whatever. Are you coming with me, or not?"

  
"Wha- Why?" Jack didn't like me, and I didn't like him. That was that, that was how we had established it. The fact that he had Skyped me out of the blue was an oddity I never could have anticipated.

"Because you know more about this than any of us. Plus, I need a driver." He hadn't called for me. He'd called for what I knew. The logic of it, oh, how I loved the logic of it. But at the same time I wanted it to be someone, anyone, but Jack.

"What about Mark?" He was part of this, too. Him and Merlin, him and me. "Whatever we find, he should know too."

 

Jack fidgeted onscreen. "Mark... if we end up doing something illegal, I don't want him to get wrapped up into it."

 

"But-"

Jack's eyes hardened suddenly, cutting me off. "I'm serious, Sam. This is some really stupid shit that we're about to do. I don't want him to worry, and I _really_ don't want him to get involved. The fewer people, the better. If we find anything, we can always tell him. But he's not the type to ever advocate this."

I contemplated his offer for a moment, rolling it back and forth around my head, throwing pros and cons at myself from every direction. "All that considered, what if I say no?"

His grey-blue eyes pierced the darkness. "I know you won't."

He was right. As much as I tried to deny it, I still wanted information on HESHE, on where I came from, on what was up with me and Jack. And, knowing that he wanted the information as well, it made sense to team up and work together for our common goal, as much as we resented it, however dumb our plan was. He knew me better than I realized, and his logic had won me over. "...Where's your hotel?"

  
-

Mark's sedan putted along the desert road, with me at the wheel and Jack to the side. The car's clock glared back at me -  _2:28AM_ \- un-needingly reminding me that stealing my landlord's car with someone I only sort of knew and liked even less to investigate a government cover-up in the middle of the night was very, very wrong, that I could get very, very arrested, and that there was a very, very little chance of us two unintentional twins escaping without being caught.

Jack stuck his head out of the open passenger window. "Are you  _sure_ you know where the hell this place is?"

"Nope." And that much was true; when I had left the facility, I had assumed that I would never have reason to go back to HESHE. I wanted to get to the city, the trek was so incredibly excruciatingly blazing hot, my memory had been only barely catching up. I could make excuses for my lack of navigational skills for days. I was already lost, but that much I wouldn't tell my compatriot, or I'd never hear the end of it.

"Jesus, you sound more and more like Mark every day." Jack had thought I was joking, as if one could just laugh it off, as if the prospect of us starving to death in the desert was just a funny passing laugh. For Jack, maybe it was. I let his comment hang in silence.

_2:44AM_. The roads were blending into one, the way they had in my memory; each turn blurred away into a straightaway, or a slight bend, as soon as I rounded it. Jack was watching the scenery through an open passenger window; the wind tousled his green hair into furry shapes, almost recognizable but not quite, swirling and flipping - there one minute, gone the next. In the dark, his blue eyes looked graphite grey, watching the ground and sky and stars rush by. The world outside, dark but not quite, a barren night world but for spillover light from the City of Angels. Stars glinting; constellations I could spend hours hunting for if I cared, which I did - almost. The task at hand was far more important than the inviting desert world outside.

Cruising, the speedometer reading forty, fifty, sixty. It was peaceful, driving in what would be silence if not for the comforting purr of the sedan's engines. The horizon, curved from the planet and rumpled from the hills, staying the same yet slightly different. Then, in the distance, very different.

"Jack. Do you see that?" There was a box on the horizon. A cube, a building. "Do you think that's HESHE?"

"Beats me. You've been there, I haven't." My dream-like trance was broken by Jack's reality, a harsh snap. He was rarely this salty, as far as I could tell. Yet another unpredictability.

"Is there anything else  _out_ here?"

"According to Google, HESHE isn't out here, either. There shouldn't be anything here from L.A. to Vegas. Just... just a lot of Western sets Mother Nature bought for Hollywood a few million years ago."

"Hundred thousand," I automatically corrected.

"Whatever." Annoyed. The joke only then caught on to me.

The horizon cube steadily grew bigger, slowly revealing more and more familiar features. Cement walls, whitewashed yet still a dirty grey; glass double doors; a payphone on the side of the road beside. Tall, maybe six or seven stories. Soon we were no more than a mile away, and the suspense - and my excitement - grew.

  
The road suddenly swerved, and I followed. "What the hell?" Jack, reaching the line that divided frustration and fury. I braked, and the car slowed to a stop in the middle of the road several yards later. The asphalt straightaway continued, for miles, ahead of us, leading away from the HESHE facility.

"We have to turn around." I was defeated, reality having pounded me into the ground.

"No shit, Sam. Unless..." Jack's eyes lit up, almost maniacally, a glint of electricity against the graphite blue. "Give me the wheel."

"What?! You don't have a license! You've never even driven a car before!"

"We're going off-roading." His words parsed and I accelerated instinctively, as if I could leave Jack and his crazy, illegal backup plans behind. A sharp, sudden pain flashed in my shoulder, and I winced in retaliation, my focus diverted in that single fraction of a second. But Jack was ready, and in that moment snatched the opportunity to reach across and grab the steering wheel from me, swerving into the dirt on the side of the road, kicking up gravel and dust and who-knows-what-else. Reflexes kicked in and I pulled the parking brake with as much force as I could muster. The car's rear wheels locked up, and we careened across the desert flat, skidding and spinning and making my brain sure we were about to die until common sense caught up to reflexes and I stepped on the brake pedal as well. The car finally stopped moving, the world finally stopped spinning, Jack finally leaned back into his seat. He was staring up at the roof of the car, panting. "I thought you knew how to drive."

I looked back at him, breathing just as heavily. "I thought you didn't."

He chuckled. "I don't. I really don't."

"Off-roading was a terrible idea." I was blunt. I didn't care what Jack thought, I didn't care about getting to HESHE. I didn't even care about road safety. I just wanted to not be lost, and straying from the only reliable connection to civilization seemed like a really terrible idea.

"I know. But what other options do we have?" Jack was staring out the back windshield at the now-not-so-distant building, almost longingly. I saw a thirst for information in his eyes, a thirst I had long since buried but he clearly hadn't. A thirst that he had reawakened in me no less than an hour previous.

"Jack, I'm lost. I've been lost for almost an hour. Maybe that's HESHE, maybe it's not. But this is a really bad idea, and I am almost certain that we can be arrested for even getting this close to the building. All I care about is getting home, and maybe sleep. And neither of those things are going to happen if we get caught stealing information on a government cover-up at three in the morning. Especially when it's  _us_. Especially when you're a foreigner, they have records of me already, and we look like identical twins."

"Come  _on_ , Sam. There's nobody here. I'm sure there hasn't been anyone here for months, not since they sent you and that fake Darkiplier kid and anyone else they had bottled up here away."

"Security cameras."

"Can easily be taken out."

"Automatic locks."

"There are keycards."

"Not in the building."

"Quite possibly, actually. Nobody knows about this facility except you and a bunch of kids, and as we've proven" - he gestured at the air around him - "it's virtually impossible to get to. It's not on Google, or Apple, or any other public map, and these roads lead to absolutely nowhere and back. I doubt half of them are even marked. Leaving a keycard somewhere convenient in the building wouldn't necessarily be a terrible idea."

"I'm not doing it."

"Sam." He gazed into my eyes, which I only then realized were just as blue as his. "No, Jack. Jack McLoughlin, I know you want this information. What they did to you. Why you look like me, why I look like you. This is our opportunity, our  _only_ opportunity. You know as well as I do that we'll never find this place again."

_3:12AM_ , the car clock blinked at me. Another reminder that time was ticking by, steadily and entirely too fast. Morning, marching its way to Mark discovering me vanished, his car gone. I should have been considering Jack's point, rebutting it, but my mind was blank. A clean, happy, thoughtless fuzz, having forgotten Mark, HESHE, the chip, even the incident just moments prior. I remember hearing myself say back, "Okay, I'll do it," but I don't remember why.

Instead of lighting up, Jack inhaled deeply, then exhaled, his face gone dark and his eyes gone serious. "We're going to drive across this dirt flat and  _not_ pull the handbrake this time."

"Sounds good," I said, suddenly questioning and already regretting my decision. But this time, I had made a promise, and I was going to keep it.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Jack attempt to execute their plan, but hit a road block.

Nighttime cloaked us in a mirage of invisibility as I pulled the sedan up to the front of the building. Our license plates and faces were covered, albeit suspiciously; I voiced my complaints to Jack, who agreed, but pointed out that we really, really couldn't get caught.   
  
The glass double doors to reception were locked, of course. Without much thought, Jack pried something large, metal, and important-looking from under the hood of the car and threw it at the glass from the cover of the sedan. The doors spiderwebbed magnificently, then explosively shattered, spraying small, sharp polygonal shards in every direction. I cowered behind the car, in an effort not to be cut, as Jack approached the double doors to the building.  
  
"Was that really a good idea?" I had only whimpered to myself, but in this silent desert wasteland, Jack had heard. I saw him grimace and shrug, and as I crawled out of the cover of the car, realized just how half-baked his entire entrance endeavor was.  
  
"Careful," Jack warned as we stepped through the now-empty doorframes, avoiding as much as we could of the carnage he had committed upon the glass, picking past what were to us only small glints of silver moonlight.  
  
We entered a spacious room, one that was probably a sheet-clean white in daylight but was just as night-grey as anything else under the moon. The floor was tiled with small white squares, the same color as the embellishment-free walls and smooth ceiling. There were several fake potted plants throughout the room that seemed familiar - I realized that they were the same plants as had decorated Pear Lady’s office. There was a large wooden desk to the left of the room and an uncomfortable-looking navy-grey couch to the right. Other than that, the room was empty.  
  
I bit my lip. "Say, Jack, don't you think it's a bit odd that this  _secret government facility_ in the middle of the desert has not only a reception, but a reception with glass double doors that are made out of something even weaker than a car windshield?"  
  
"I dunno. It could be an old building, or once used for something else." He was shrugging it off, as if it were nothing more than a passing comment.  
  
"That they didn't reinforce or rebuild? I mean, this is the government we're talking about."  
  
"The government that's a trillion dollars in debt. It's a little weird, yeah, but not that big of a stretch." Jack picked up his metal rod. "See any cameras?"  
  
I inspected the corners of the room, lit only by moonlight. The were barren but for the tiled ceiling. "Nope. I don't even think there's power."  
  
"Then we're going to need these." Jack pulled something out of his hoodie's pockets. "Torch?"  
  
I took the offered flashlight, and flipped a switch on the end. It flickered on, pouring a dim beam of light over the dark floor that completely dispersed after a few feet. "How cheap were these flashlights?"  
  
"Maybe a euro or two each. Probably a few bucks. You do the math, since you're the one with the built-in calculator."  
  
"Ha-ha, very funny." Sure, I was good at math, but should he have been as well, if we were really so alike? What was there to make fun of?  
  
“That’s not true?” Jack acted surprised, quirking up his eyebrows and smiling mischievously. “I was going to get you to do my taxes for me. Ahem, I mean  _let_  you do my taxes for me.”  
  
I ignored his comment. The joke wasn’t funny, or at least that’s what I told myself. Besides, more pressing matters were at hand. “Why aren’t there any security cameras here either? I’m really starting to question the priorities of the American government.”  
  
Jack was leaning on the metal car part, grinning. "Beats me. I mean, we've already established that Americans aren't necessarily the brightest of bulbs. So if you extrapolate, carry the six... yep, sounds just like what I'd expect."  
  
"Jack, be serious! These jokes are absurd! We just broke into what could possibly be the most top-secret facility in America with a technically stolen car at three in the morning, and not discretely either! At this point, if there are any cameras within a forty-mile radius we're as good as solitary confinement."  
  
He looked toward me, and his eyes held mine for a solid three or four seconds - ocean blue staring deep into my very being, my very soul. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled. "Sam... Sam, I joke around because I  _know_ that. And I know that if I don't take my mind off of it... if I don't take my mind off of it I would completely break down. I wouldn't be able to do anything but wait here for however long it takes for the military to round me up and throw me somewhere dark and cold for the rest of my life. And I don't want that, and I sure as hell hope you don't want that."  
  
His gaze finally released me. I stood, shaken, for a moment or two before whispering, "Let's find a keycard. Any door we enter from here is almost certainly locked."  
  
He nodded solemnly as he checked the single door adjoining reception. It was steel, heavy and painted a solid ashen grey. And, judging by the clicking sound it made when Jack tried the handle, locked. My point was proven.  
  
Jack meandered over toward the desk, taking his time to avoid shards of glass and care to inspect the floor for anything unusual. Upon reaching his destination, he began opening the drawers of the desk, filing through papers and looking for anything that could possibly help us open our mystery door. Before inspection, he carefully pulled stacks of the papers out onto the desk. They were all waivers, and they were all blank.  
  
Upon realizing that I was helping little by just standing around, I sidestepped to the couch. At first glance, that's all it was - a couch. Nothing more, nothing less. But I reached behind the cushions anyway, and while I felt nothing behind the first two, the third yielded me a small plastic card, the same sort of size and shape as Mark's credit card or my driver's license. I glanced up at my compatriot. "Hey, Jack - I think I've got something."  
  
His flashlight glinted off the card. It was completely smooth, white, and blank, but for the black magnetic strip along the side. He laughed. "That was in the couch? Jesus, this is just like a puzzle game. Random things in random places that do random things."  
  
"Think it works, or is it a red herring?" I turned the card in my hand, inspecting it for anything that would let me onto its purpose, but the card retained its secrets.  
  
"I don't think this is  _that_ much like a puzzle game."  
  
I slid the card neatly into the slot on the door, whispering to myself what I suppose now was a quick prayer of sorts -  _please work_ \- and held my breathe for a solid second. Then two solid seconds. Then four. Finally, I realized the problem and exhaled. "Jack, it's an electronic lock. It's an electronic lock and there's no power."  
  
He smacked his palm against his face. "Of  _course!_  My God, and we were  _this_ close, too..."  
  
"Do you think there's another way to get in?" I tried to be hopeful, tried to visualize a solution just within reach.  
  
Jack threw his hands straight into the air. "Oh  _of course_ , don't worry! Just walk around the back of the building and there's a convenient pile of papers with all the information you're ever going to need about this  _top. Secret. Government. Facility._  Yup, a simple, easy solution for everyone."  
  
My minuscule hope shattered, spiderwebbing just like the doors to reception did when Jack attacked it with the car's likely-important rod. "We can't just  _leave_. We got this far, right? We're criminals already."  
  
But Jack's usual optimism was gone, now, evaporated by the scorching rays of reality. He slumped to the floor. "I just realized that I'm a foreign celebrity who just committed a federal-level felony in perhaps the most powerful country in the world. If we're found, I'm not just fucked. They'll think I'm a spy or something, Sam! All of fucking _Ireland's_ fucking fucked." He was quivering, the way I've heard gelatin described in book after book. _"Fuck..."_  
  
I clambered over to him and put my arm around his shoulders. I didn't say anything. I couldn't say anything. Silence enveloped the room - my nighttime monster had returned.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morning breaks and the duo finds a solution.

Hours passed, and soon dawn filtered into the room, pink and golden rays glinting off of the triangles of glass scattered about the floor, reminding me of the coming day, now that the coming day had come. The stress of our situation should have been present, but since Jack's breakdown it had been slowly relieving itself. I had offered to leave once or twice throughout the night, but each time Jack denied me. While I could've left without him, I wasn't about to leave him there. I didn't know why.  
  
Now Jack was asleep, slumped against the wall with the hood of his sweater shadowing his face. I carefully stood up from beside him, sure to not disturb him. I fingered the pocketed keycard as I shuffled toward the door once again. I knew it wouldn't work, but a small hope still remained that somehow,  _somehow_ , we could get out of this mess with what we came for.  
  
The card fit the slot wonderfully. It had obviously been made for it. I stuck it in and left it there, marveling at the card, wondering how the technology behind the door worked. Wondering if you could make an electronic lock with batteries, and then wondering exactly how we thought of the concept of batteries in the first place.  
  
 _Ding!_  
  
...What?  
  
A small green light flickered at the bottom of the door handle, which, as I now saw, read,  _BATTERY OPERATED SINCE 2008_. Battery operated electronic locks  _were_ possible! But more importantly...  
  
"Hey, Jack!"  
  
"Hm?" Groggy, needing sleep.  
  
"Jack, the door works!"  
  
"You're kidding." He was now fully awake. "You're kidding, that's not possible!"  
  
"We didn't leave the card in long enough when we tried it the first time, I think. It's battery-operated."  
  
"No! That's the kind of mistake idiots in terrible cartoons make. Not  _us_."  
  
"And Mark. Mark would make that mistake."  
  
"Mark  _would_ make that mistake." He was smiling now, happy and chipper as ever. "Have you tried the door?"  
  
I pulled down on the handle, and the door swung open.  
  
-  
  
"Huh. It's a corridor."   
  
"No shit, Sherlock."  
  
But even as I said it, I had to admit that Jack was right. Neither of us had known what to expect, and the fact that the door opened us up to the obvious answer was, in our shaky, sleep-deprived state, admittedly not very obvious. Who knows what we had been expecting, but it certainly wasn't what we got.  
  
"Well. There must be something here  _somewhere_. If there's one hallway, there've gotta be more, right?" Jack's voice was shaking, and it was all I could muster to not think of the night before. It was clearly still bothering him - hell, it was still bothering  _me_.  
  
"Hm. Yeah, I guess." The corridor was dark, the morning sunlight not quite reaching the back of the room. I squinted, trying to make out what I thought might be a doorway at the end, but my eyes hadn't quite adjusted and I was left hanging, reaching forward awkwardly in the dark.  
  
"Hey, do you still have one of those flashlights?" I looked back at Jack, hoping to illuminate the darkness, banish the black cloud of blindness. He shrugged before handing me a light that I then switched on, letting the dim bulb flicker and glow.  
  
"Well then. Time to stumble around in the dark, and hopefully not break an ankle tripping over something." I nodded in response, and sighed before stepping forward into the abyss of a hallway. The walls seemed to close in on me as I approached a door adjoining the left side of the corridor, but I tried to ignore it, turning the doorknob to enter the room. Behind me, I heard Jack do the same.  
  
In the dim light of the flashlight, I could see that the room was fairly empty, save for a desk and a bookshelf. Another fake plant, like the ones in reception and the ones in Pear Lady's office, was positioned neatly on the top of the shelf, but the shelf was otherwise devoid of adornment. The top of the desk was clean, and when I went to open the drawers, they, too, were empty. A scan of the walls yielded no more results either.  
  
"This one's empty!" I called to Jack, and heard a grunt of acknowledgement, before shutting the door and moving to the next room.   
  
This room was even more barren, presenting only a steel bench against the opposing wall and yet another potted plant. I sighed as I scanned the room, the flashlight wavering in all its inexpensive glory. Tiles, plaster, tiles, plaster, tiles again. Absolutely nothing, again. I left, once again shutting the door behind me. Onto the next room.  
  
But the next room was the same, dark and empty; so was the next after that, and the silence that came from Jack's side of the hallway told me that his were as well. And so we proceeded down the hallway, until finally we reached the door at the end, every room we had inspected as voided and plain as the last.  
  
"Find anything?" He sounded tired, and I shook my head, and he shivered. "Well then. Let's proceed."  
  
I watched his reach out, put his hand on the handle, watched the handle turn; I fidgeted in anticipation - would there be answers, or just more empty rooms?  
  
Finally, the door swung open, and we stepped through.  
  
The room we entered was small, quaint; I didn't even see a single one of the repeating plants. What I  _did_  see, however, was a door. An elevator door.  
  
"The power's out. Think it works?" Jack asked before reaching out to press a lone button on the side of the wall.  
  
"We'll see, I guess," I responded, but it seemed clear that our journey was to end here. We had reached a dead end.  
  
But when he withdrew his hand from the wall, having pressed the button, I heard a faint whirring from far below. We stood in shocked silence as the light above the door began to glow, weak as our flashlights, weak as our hope. The whirring grew louder, louder, louder still until  _ding!_ and the doors opened, and the whirring stopped.  
  
"Let's not," I said. Jack looked back, confused. "This is bad, this is suspicious, this is..."  
  
"Sam, it's... We can't just go  _back..."_  
  
"Jack! Don't you  _see?_ This is not good! Why does the elevator work, if the power's out? Couldn't that mean that other stuff is working as well? Cameras? Security? If they bothered turning off reception's power, why not take out the elevator's power too? What if someone's down there? What will we do  _then?"_  
  
"If someone's down there, they'll know something about this whole scheme."  
  
 _"Jack!"_  
  
"Sam,  _please_..." Blue eyes, grey eyes, green eyes - I knew they were blue, pacific blue, but I couldn't tell in the dim light from the elevator. Dull and tired, weather-beaten and sad, I could tell that much.   
  
"I don't want to do it!" Tears stung the edges of my vision, wet and unrelenting, and I felt  _something_ explode inside me, although I didn't know what.   
  
"So do you just want to stay here and  _die,_ alone and forgotten? I know you won't leave without me, or you would've left last night! I'm going, and maybe I'll die down there, but maybe I won't. But if you stay here, and I get killed, you're not gonna know what to do, huh?"  
  
"I-"  
  
"So what'll you do? Will you go down to try to find me, and die yourself? Or will you go running away back to Mark and try to explain to him exactly what happened to me? If you come with me, we can at least try to get what we want! We can get what we  _came_  here for, Sam!"  
  
"But-"  
  
"Don't you see? We're already gonna be in trouble. There's nothing left to  _lose."_ He wasn't shouting anymore. His voice was low and quiet, his accent heavy, his eyes serious. Somewhere there, I had stopped crying - I didn't know when, I didn't know why.  
  
I watched as Jack shuffled into the elevator. He looked back up at me, his expression defeated. "So are you coming too?"  
  
"I-" I couldn't just leave him. Not to do this on his own.  _I_  was the reason we were here at all, I was the reason he cared. It was my duty, my responsibility to see this through, to see this through to the very end. "Yes. Yes, I'm coming."  
  
And that was how I finally stepped into the elevator, its doors waiting patiently; those very doors closed, and the whirring began anew.  
  
It was the anticipation of our descent that I was awaiting when suddenly,  _suddenly,_  all too  _suddenly_ a hot red pain shot from my shoulder, it bit at my skin and my vision and everything I had; I could feel my legs giving and could only let out a shriek as I collapsed to the floor. I could feel nothing, see nothing, hear nothing but my ragged breath, shaking body, and the pure, white-hot  _pain_ as it began to fade, and my mind went blank.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Jack discover reach the bottom of the elevator.

_"SAM!"_  
  
I heard nothing at first, saw nothing at first; there was nothing there, nothing there, I was slipping slipping  _slipping away  
  
_ "Sam,  _please,_ wake up!"  
  
 _"Sam..."_  
  
 _Jack._ Jack, and a dull throb in my shoulder, the steady whir of the elevator, the faint glow of two cheap flashlights. Recollection materialized around me; night, desert, HESHE. My mind still hazy, I gasped for air before beginning to cough violently. I could feel a hand on my shoulder - Jack's hand? and no sooner had I realized that when the coughing stopped; I opened my eyes in a squint and caught a fuzzy, greenish blur, my eyes struggling to focus in the harsh light of the elevator. My breathing calmed, and I heard Jack whisper to himself, "Thank  _god..."  
  
_ I sat up and looked him in the eye, and we regarded each other for a moment, until Jack decided to speak. "What... What  _happened,_  Sam?   
  
But I couldn't recall. "I- I don't know. One minute I was fine, the next..." The next, the next was nothing but agony. Agony and darkness. "There was this pain in my shoulder. It was really bad and really sudden, it... it felt like it was  _burning..._ It went up my arm, my neck, my whole body, and then... Then I must've fainted, or..."  
  
"Your shoulder?"  
  
"There's nothing much there now, though... Just a throb..."  
  
His eyebrow twitched. "Your  _shoulder?_ Why would there be pain  _there,_  of all places?"  
  
I shook my head, my exhausted body trembling from the effort to stay conscious.  _Why_ would  _it be there?_  
  
Realization hit like a whip. Pain in my shoulder, the shoulder with the  _chip._ Pain, pain from the chip? How could that be possible?  
  
"Jack, I..."  
  
"Hm?" He locked glances with me, blue against blue.  
  
"I... there's a microchip in my shoulder. Kinda like RFID, only different. We think... We think HESHE put it in there."  _Property_ flashed through my mind again, and I could tell that I was grimacing. "The pain... I think it came from there. The place with the chip..."  
  
Jack bit his lip in concentration, an odd expression of contemplation carved across his face. "How... How could that be possible? If it's really just a microchip..."  
  
I shook my head. "It's not. It's... weird. Special. We tried to look at it with a scanner, and... there was a lot on it. Way more than there should've been. And it was all encrypted."  
  
"So you're thinking that it might have been able to sort of, well, 'shock', your nervous system? Or something? Why?"  
  
"I... I honestly have no idea." I sighed, exasperation getting the best of me. "But right now, I don't really care. There are more pressing matters. Namely, we are now on the lowest floor."  
  
A soft, tinny  _ding!_ sounded from the elevator above. Raw anxiety pounded through my chest, and I gripped my shoulder in unhappy anticipation. I tried to sigh to myself to calm myself down, but the doors were already rattling open and away, hiding in the wall the way elevator doors do. I heard Jack step out of the elevator, and I followed him reluctantly. My feet were trying to drag me back to safety of the cold blue lights we had just exited, but the doors shut behind us with a terrifying finality.  
  
Wherever it was that we had entered was  _dark._ Too dark to see, too dark to stand, too dark to tell that Jack was directly in front of me, and I ran into him. He stumbled through the dark, just as blind as me; I heard him curse, and it reverberated around the shadows. The echo told me that wherever we were was  _big_ \- big and dark and blind.  
  
From the corner of my eye, I spied a small red light blinking against the blackness, and reached out to beckon Jack to it as well. Who could tell what it was - a lightswitch, an alarm switch, a  _bomb?_ But it was our only lead, in this dark, dark, world, and I would have to take what I could get. We stumbled through the void, blind, and the little red light grew steadily just a bit bigger until finally, finally, I reached it.   
  
I couldn't see that my hand was trembling, not in the dark. But I could  _feel_ it, terrible expectation of a terrible fate, alone and forgotten with someone who wasn't quite enemy and wasn't quite friend. I brushed the little red light; it was set on a small, square panel, like a box, and to the left of it, there was a switch. My quaking fingers found it, the switch, and slowly,  _slowly,_ flicked it on.  
  
Nothing much happened at first, in the blackness. The little red light blinked into green, and for a moment that was all it was; I had almost given up on it when I heard the soft, electric hum of florescent lightbulbs, and slowly, slowly, slowly, our dungeon world was revealed to us.  
  
Beside me, Jack gasped, and I almost did too. When I had guessed that the place was big, I had been right - the cement ceiling hung at least twenty-five feet above our heads, and the room extended for hundreds of feet in either direction. But it was less the size and construction of the room that we were reacting to than what the room itself contained. Every few feet, in every direction, was a tank - perhaps a meter wide, and two meters tall, their tops disappeared into a mass of tubes of wires that ran along rusty steel girders. Each contained a thick, grey liquid - some were filled less than others, indicating that they had likely been partially drained at some point. They each had a small, black screen affixed to the glass, and while a few screens remained dark, most flickered with strange digits in a sickeningly-neon green. And this went on, and on, and on, for what seemed like miles into the dimly-lit underground.  
  
Upon closer examination, these ciphers of the screens made more sense;  _PLS001, PLS002, PLS003,_  each row counted upwards from the box with the switch, and each row had a different identifier.  _PLS, FKB, ROD_... They went on for dozens of these rows, of these identifiers, that I noticed as I wandered the perimeter.  
  
"What... what do you suppose these numbers  _mean?"_ Jack, from behind me, and in my contemplation I made a connection.  
  
"I've got this... identification number, that HESHE or something gave me. SML006. These numbers sound like that, sort of."  
  
"Other experiments like you? Were there this many?"  
  
"I don't think so, but..."  
  
Jack shook his head. "Fine. But why these numbers? These numbers in particular, I mean? And what's with the letters? It's not like they're organized or anything."  
  
"I don't know. But maybe... maybe there's a tank with  _my_  number."  
  
"You want to find that?"  
  
"What else can we do?"  
  
My companion sighed, too tired to argue. "It'll be faster if we split up. SML006, you said? Find a row with SML, and come find me when you do. I'll do the same. Got it?"  
  
"Okay." I watched him turn away, shuffling slowly as he examined each tank, and then turned away myself, letting the darkness settle over me as I began my search.  
  
As my footsteps echoed away into the darkness, I found my thoughts wandering - it was the first time in several hours I had really any time to think anything through. It was clear, I realized, that HESHE was responsible for the number, and that it was an identification number of some kind. That perhaps, once, there were others with a number SML - possibly even one of those kids that were released from the facility ahead of me. And it was clear that something -  _something_ \- was up with the chip. Whatever had happened in the elevator couldn't be a coincidence.   
  
I flicked past numbers, numbers, numbers, my head not really picking up any of them.  _MWT, END, SML, CTN...  
_  
I paused.  _SML?_ The sudden realization snapped me out of my thoughts. I bit back the urge to shout, afraid of making too large a sound in this strange, dangerous place. I checked the screen once again - sure enough,  _SML001_ was what flickered back at me, and I grinned inwardly to myself. I had done it - I had really done it. I had found what we were looking for.  
  
My feet pounded the floor, my heart pounded my chest, my achievement pounded my thoughts as I jogged back to Jack, smiling. I must have been running quickly - only a little more than a minute later, and I could see him half-heartedly studying a tank, in what I could only assume was a last-ditch attempt at finding anything relevant.   
  
"Jack," I panted, more than a little out-of-breath from the jog. "I... I found the thing."

 

"You found the  _SML_ tanks?" He looked back at me, surprised.

"Yeah. They're like, a long way back that way," and I gestured vaguely behind me. "I ran."

"That much is obvious," A hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his face, the first since the night before. "And now, I'm so excited that you found them that I'm gonna make you run all the way back, with me."

"C'mon!" And I let myself laugh, just a little, as we ran, and felt a small bit better about this unfamiliar Green Man Jack.

And that was how, together, we jogged through a mysterious and apparently abandoned government facility at nine on a Saturday morning, spirits high but anxious, and too absorbed in the moment to be remotely prepared for what we would discover next.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Jack find information about Sam's origin, aka The Very Shoddy Plot Twist

The bluish lights above tank  _SML006_ flickered and crackled, an alien symphony harmonious with this alien world. This tank was one of those with little fluid remaining; it was about half empty, whereas all the others around it were almost filled entirely. The floor around the base was stained a dark grey, making it obvious that some of the tank's fluid had once spilled on the floor, but the glass looked especially clean. Someone had clearly once been taking care of it, even as the others were left neglected, and I let myself wonder why.  
  
"So. We found your tank." Jack, still breathing heavily from our run. He was almost as unused to exercise as I was, I realized. "What do we do now?"  
  
"Maybe there's something on it somewhere? A clue?"  
  
"I dunno..." He shuffled to the side of the tank, inspecting the mass of wires that tangled around the side. I watched him root around in them, apparently searching for something.  
  
"What are you looking for?"  
  
"There was like, this box, right? Attached to a lot of the other tanks. It looked like a computer of some kind - maybe an information log. None of the ones I was finding worked, but maybe yours does. There could be something on it, who knows."  
  
He dug around in the wires for a bit more, his face serious, until it finally lit up. "Aha! Here we go." He had found a small black box that was affixed to the side of the tank. There was a thin, dark screen, one that was only big enough to display a couple of lines of text at a time, inset across the front, and there was a small red light blinking from the top left corner. A couple of buttons were pressed flat against the side; I assumed one was a power switch and the others were for navigating the log. "It was hard to find - there were way fewer of these wires on the other tanks. Something must've fallen, I bet. If this is really a log, they wouldn't bury it under a mountain of important shit."  
  
"Does it turn on?" I wasn't going to hold out hope; since Jack had reported that the rest of them were long dead, it was likely that this one was as well. It was probable that it wouldn't turn on at all.  
  
"Let's see." He reached up to the side of the box for the topmost switch, which was marked with a power symbol, and pressed it gingerly - he must have been afraid to break it. My breath caught in anticipation, although almost immediately, the small box began to hum. It was working! Thin green lines of text began to scrawl across the screen, and while at first they didn't make much sense, the lines were soon readable. Jack and I huddled around the box, a mere crowd of two, hungrily waiting for what the log could bestow upon us. Moments later, what we could only assume was an opening screen blinked up at us, blazing that same, eerie green.

> _Log: EHRP Experiment SML006  
> _ _Observer: Carolyn Bartlett_

"Bartlett?" I couldn't hide my surprise; I recognized that name! Bartlett, the pear - Pear Lady! "I... I met her, the day I was released! She gave me my driver's license!"  
  
"Makes sense," Jack mused. "There can't have been that many people on the project. It's a cover-up, after all. They wouldn't have brought many people on board." He clicked one of the buttons, and the text refreshed. The opening screen went away, and we were opened into the main log. The first entry, March 1992.

> _11.03.1992  
> _ _We've finally gotten another one to take. I knew it would be difficult - everything like this has been difficult, ever since Dolly the sheep. But these just haven't been sustaining. At least this one seems to be viable, but there's such a low chance it'll even survive past the germinal stage. Too many of our attempts have been failing, and if we don't start making progress soon, our funding will be cut._

"Dolly the sheep... Why is that familiar?" Jack shook his head in frustration. "I've heard that somewhere before, I swear! Where was it?"  
  
"I don't know," I responded. "But what's 'taking?' It sounds like... like a zygote, or something. Are they trying to make a zygote?"  
  
"A zygote?" Jack looked back at me, puzzled.  
  
"Like, an egg, and a sperm..." I struggled with explaining it, my awkwardness hanging heavy in the air. "Before the embryo?"  
  
" _Okay, okay,_  I get it!" Jack attempted to shove the tension aside, but it didn't really work and we were both left there, staring quizzically at the little black box. I saw Jack press his temples, obviously keen to move on - and so we did.

> _13.03.1992  
> _ _The embryo has survived two days. This isn't a record yet, but it's doing much better than our other conceptions. Dr. Randle didn't think it would last nearly 24 hours, and to be quite fair, neither did I. The conception worked, but only barely, and I doubt it will be able to function for much longer._

"Conception," Jack read. "Definitely... definitely a 'zygote.' For whatever reason."   
  
I dipped my head in acknowledgement before looking back up from the log, back at Jack. "Who's Dr. Randle?" It was unlikely he would know, I knew, but the name had seemed to come out of nowhere. I reasoned that he may have noticed something that I hadn't.  
  
But Jack only shrugged. "A supervisor or something, I'll bet. At least, that's what it sounds like. Let's keep going." I nodded, and new text began to scroll across the screen.

> _18.03.1992  
> _ _It's working! Far better than any of us could have predicted - it wasn't thought to be able to last nearly this long. None of our other conceptions have sustained operation this long. This is only the sixth one for this sample, too. Just imagine what else we could do with this! Whoever swabbed SML000 seems to have really hit the mother load - even if this one doesn't survive, we'll surely be able to make others work._

> _09.04.1992  
> _ _I can't believe it's working this well! It's been long enough that we're crossing our fingers that it's finally stable. None of our other conception attempts for SML000 have held out - even the ones that take have died within a week. This one started so weakly too. We'll just have to keep trying; if we've done it once, we can do it again._

> _15.04.1992  
> _ _Development is continuing as normal. Everyone here is on edge, waiting for the stability of SML006 to drop, but it hasn't yet. I don't want to say it, but this one might stay stable, even as others are failing._

"SML000? Swabbed?" I shook my head. "This doesn't make much sense. What does this have to do with anything?"  
  
"It really does sound like they're just trying to conceive embryos without a mother," Jack thought. "But that's not something that the government would go to this much trouble to cover up. So _what_...?" His voice trailed off, and he began to click through the lines of the log again.  
  
The next several months of log were the same - development was stable, it seemed to be staying stable, but it fail at any time. Pear Lady would make comments on embryonic development, and resign the project to never getting another conception to work. As Jack skipped through line after line, it felt like I was reading the same thing over, and over, and over again. But Pear Lady's observations began to get more and more hopeful as the months went on - until a particularly odd one.

> _15.08.1992  
> _ _They want to chip it. Someone at the top of EHRP thinks that SML006 is going to survive until infancy, and decided that we're going to chip it. It's a fetus already, and while it's stable, it's still probable that it won't last these last four months. A chip would not be good for it - it's at odds already. Hooking something up to the nervous system could cause paralysis, brain damage, or worse. It could even kill it prematurely. We've managed to keep it alive this long; we don't want to accidentally kill it now. Us researchers are trying to organize a report to the senior staff. I hope it will work._

> _16.08.1992  
> _ _The supervisors turned us down. They say that SML006 will need the chip in case it reaches infancy, and that the longer we wait, the more dangerous it is. They want the nervous system to be as used to the chip as possible. It makes sense, or so I've been trying to convince myself. I just don't want to lose all this work - we're still having issues with reconceiving SML000, or any of our other samples, for that matter._

> _17.08.1992  
> _ _They chipped it today. It's responding well so far, but we're still anxious. It hasn't been even 16 hours. God, this feels like when we first conceived it. What's worse is that they won't even tell us what's on the chip - supposedly it's confidential. Seems like the entire EHRP is already plenty confidential to me, but don't tell Randle I said that._

"A chip? Like, your chip?" Jack shook his head. "It's encrypted, so of  _course_ it's confidential - but why would they keep that from their own workers? Doesn't sound like this lady was too bottom-of-the-barrel, either, since she's an observer."  
  
"I don't know." I suddenly felt an overwhelming dread, and reached up to brush my shoulder. What, exactly,  _was_ the chip? Something too secret, too strange, too potentially dangerous for anyone to know, apparently, and I felt very uneasy with the knowledge of how deeply buried in my body it was.  
  
Jack was clicking through more and more entries of the log, and I scanned each briefly before it disappeared. Against all expectation, the chip took, and Pear Lady commented on how relieved the entire staff was that it worked. There were more conception attempts made; she even mentioned that other conceptions had worked, although they weren't ones that were labelled SML. The fetus was developing well, and she was less anxious, and the entries came and went, like tides.  
  
But as we drew later through the log - close to a specific date, I realized, one that I didn't even know I was waiting for, at first - as we grew closer to that date, my tension grew, and as my tension grew Jack's did too. That one date, that one entry, that one log entry that some part of me already knew was there, and the electricity in the alien air sparked, until we reached that date.   
  
When I realized what it was, I drew in a breath.

> _11.12.1992  
> _ _It's official. EHRP Experiment SML006 is the first human clone to survive into infancy._

Jack and I looked up, regarded each other for that stricken, paralyzing moment, and I heard him whisper, just barely -  _"What?"_  
  
and I looked back at him, blue in my eyes, his eyes, our eyes, and, voice shaking, softly said, "That's... that's my birthday."


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack and Sam attempt to process the brevity of Sam's origin.

"So. You're a clone." Jack's blue gaze bored into my subconscious. "They fucking cloned me."

"I'm... I'm a  _clone_ ," I whispered, awestruck. "I mean, it makes sense. It makes  _so_  much sense.  _Why_ did it never occur to me? To us?"

"I..." Jack shook his head. "No. We were blind. But why clone  _me?_ Why clone anyone at all?"

He was right. What motivation could the government possibly have to do something like this? Obviously, they thought that this research was important - they had clearly invested thousands, if not millions, of dollars into this facility. But  _why_ was it important?

"Just thinking about this is making my head hurt," I concluded, looking back at Jack. "While we're here, we should look for something else. There  _has_ to be more."

"There's probably more in the log." He looked back toward the little black box, whose thin green lines of text blinked patiently for our return.

"Let's start there, then."

Jack looked back to the log and sighed. "Who knows what we'll find now." He clicked one of the buttons on the side - the same one he had been clicking over and over again previously - and watched the text scroll across the screen once again.  


>  _11.23.1992  
> _ _We've moved the infant to the suspended aquarium. Dr. Randle has informed us that this is where the specimen will be kept through development. It is growing well, right on time with projected growth. It will be amazing to see what more can be done with this experiment - we are anticipating great things. We're still having difficulties with reconception of SML000, but the team has hope that other samples might be more promising._

"So they kept you in the tank. This tank, probably." He was hesitant, sure that I was uncomfortable with this, and I was. As I evidently became more and more human, I grew less and less at ease with the current situation. "At least as an infant. That might be why you don't have any memories. But then how did you learn?"

We read through more and more of the reports. They mostly said about the same things - reports about my development, with her comment. Slowly, they came less and less often - once a day, once a week, once a month. There was less and less to report, evidently. 

But slowly, as the years passed, her reports - or at least, her comments - grew less and less monotonous. She stopped making as detailed of observations, and really only noted her thoughts at the time. The entries seemed to grow slowly more casual, and she seemed far more distracted than the serious, driven woman from the previous entries. She made log entries infrequently, and when she did, they were often vague or off-topic. By the time we reached 1995, she had made entries less than once a month.  


>  _05.06.1995  
> _ _All the excitement with the new samples has been leaving us neglectful of this specimen. He looks like human being now, that much is undeniable. He's a child, a real child. We're finally making great progress, but we can't forget how far we've come already. We created a whole new person, after all, without a mother or a father at all._

"'He?'" I read. "Every other time she's referred to it - me - as an 'it.' What changed?"

  
"Well, have you ever seen a picture of a fetus? They don't even really look human, much the less like they have a gender. This was probably the first time she really consciously realized that you were more than a lump of cells. No offense."

 

"I guess. But it would have made more sense to stick with one thing, I dunno." I bit the inside of my lip, feeling awkward. I didn't like the notion of the HESHE workers thinking of me as only an experiment, but I also didn't like how personal Pear Lady's logs sounded now.

"It sounds like they were getting other things to work," Jack added, in an attempt to change the subject. "She's so vague about it, though..." He skipped forward through the log, the green text scrolling mechanically across the small screen, and I tried to forget my discomposure.  


>  _07.17.1995  
> _ _I've been spending more and more time around the SML aquariums recently. My work is mainly in conception - not post-embryonic development - but with all the rush for the new samples I've been quite overwhelmed. They don't need another person in the way, anyway.  
> _ _SML006 is stable. He's growing well. It's been two, no, three, years since we first conceived him, and I never could've imagined that he'd get this far. I sometimes wonder what he'd be like, if we ever brought him out of the tank. My sister has a kid about his age - maybe they would be friends. But they're planning to keep him unconscious indefinitely, so I suppose I'll never know._

I blinked at the log, comprehending. Jack raised his eyebrows, worried. "What is it?"

"I don't like it." I tried to force away the uneasiness writhing in my gut. "She's this cold, analytical scientist. She's part of a cover-up that's cloning people against their will for who-knows-what-nefarious-reason. I'm claimed as 'property,' for god's sake. Why does she care? Why does she care if her lab rat's a fucking human? She sure didn't seem to care when I left HESHE, that's for sure!"

My companion looked away, and I heard him exhale warily. He clicked to the next one without a word. I couldn't read his expression.

>  _08.06.1995  
> _ _I've been rereading my old log entries from all those years ago, and I wonder where my drive went. I used to be so focused, so serious, about this whole project, and with the progress we've been making with some of the other samples should be motivating me just as much as it did back then. This is what I've spent my whole life on, after all. But I feel as if I've been losing interest in this project. I don't know why._

>  _08.21.1995  
> _ _They've finally gotten another conception attempt to take. It's survived a month already, but they're planning on terminating it. I don't think they were planning on actually getting anything to work, and they don't have the resources to let it develop fully. Dr. Randle seems to think we can do it again, though, if we can convince Congress to boost our budget. I should be able to remember which sample it was off the top of my head, but I can't seem to.  
> _ _At least SML006 seems to be doing well with the resource shortage. That could be why they can't support the new conception. Who knows, though - nobody tells me anything anymore._

"That's..." I didn't really know what to say. "Odd?"

"A change of heart?" Jack finished for me. "She was so resolute about it. Especially since those new ones are... are working. The same ones as she mentioned before, I'll bet. She should be excited, or at least anticipatory."

"I guess." I reread the log entries again. "She's just so... disinterested. It seems like the other workers could tell, too."

"I wonder why, though," Jack said, and skipped to the next entry to drop the subject.

>  _09.02.1995  
> _ _I don't think I'll ever have kids - honestly, I'd be a terrible mother - but sometimes I think of SML006 as my child, seeing him grow like this. I guess in a way I'm as much his mom as anything, even if we're not related by blood. I've been with him every step of the way.  
> _ _I wonder what SML000, the original, is like. We took the sample in Ireland, but we haven't been tracking the original donors, so who knows._

"SML000? Like, me?" Jack shook his head. "America gave me a fucking identification number. They didn't even bother to know my name. Bullshit."

  
But I didn't really hear him. I was too busy processing something else, something that bothered me far more. I said it quietly, under my breath: _"Mother?"_

Jack glanced back up at me. "What?"

 

"She..." I couldn't put it into words, that emotion I was feeling. I couldn't say anything, not anything that would express it. "She thinks... she's thinks she's like a mother. She thinks she's like my fucking mom." I snarled slightly, and Jack jumped, surprised. "She thinks she was like my _mom._ Well, I think she's right - I think she's bad with kids. I think she's really bad with kids, if she thinks _motherhood_ is like cloning someone and keeping them unconscious in a tank-aquarium-whatever-the- _hell_ -this-is!"

"Sam..." Jack was staring at me, dumbstruck - perhaps even a little scared. 

"No. Shut up. If I ever see this woman _ever_ again, I'll..." I couldn't find the words, not anymore. I felt something hot and wet on my face, but whether it was sweat or tears, I couldn't tell. Jack was silent, and I felt his discomfort. I was shaking, shaking like an earthquake, and I grimaced, feeling my face fold in on itself as if it were made of paper. "Switch it. I can't..."

Jack nodded, and I heard the little box click again. I steeled myself for whatever would come next.  


>  _09.25.1995  
> _ _I can't take it anymore. This feels so wrong. Every time I see SML006, I can't help but think about what he'd be like without the tank. He should be running around outside with other kids, not hooked up unconscious in a suspension aquarium. He only exists because we created him, but that means we should take responsibility for him. It infuriates me that he'll probably never see the light of day.  
> _ _I want to resign. Maybe I will, if these new samples work. They don't seem to need me, after all, and I have the feeling Randle and the others want me to as well._

The next line was blank, and Jack looked back up at me. "That's it." He looked tired, really tired, for perhaps the first time that night, the exhaustion outlined in his eyes.

 

I was still quivering slightly, recovering from my outburst. "What do you mean, that's it?"

 

"There's nothing more in the log. That was the last entry." He clicked the button on the side a few more times to prove his point, and nothing but similar empty black lines were his reward. "...We should try to look for more, if we can find it. There are  _huge_ time gaps here - surely there's something somewhere else."

"Jack, I..." Something squirmed in my gut. I didn't want to, not after reading the log.

"Hm?" His gaze met mine, concerned. "What is it?"

"I don't like this, Jack. Looking through this. It's making me feel sick. Not just the log, just..." I tried to block Pear Lady's comments from the second-to-last entry from my mind. "The whole thing. The fact that I'm a clone, that it was against your will, and mine..."

"I..." I saw a longing in Jack's eyes then, a longing for information, a longing for truth. "But... it's..."

"What are we really getting from this? Okay, they kept me in a tank my whole life! Not that I couldn't tell already! Not that I'm much better now!" I was crying now, teary-eyed and bleary-eyed and leery-eyed. "The only person who even remotely cared about me was a weird scientist with way too many problems, and she only cared for all the wrong reasons! I don't need to know this! There's no  _point_ to me knowing this! No point except to make my problems worse, apparently!"

"Sam..." Jack sighed, deflated, as if he was waving a thought away. "It's so...  _interesting_ , I guess, in the worst way. This whole thing had never been done before, as far as we knew, or as far as they knew then. It raises so many  _questions-"  
_  
"I don't care!" I didn't care that I had interrupted him, didn't care that I had cut him off. "I don't... I don't want to do this. I don't like it. I don't like it at all."

Jack looked down, contemplating for a moment before answering. "Okay. I can respect that. This is... This is hard for me, too. I mean - they cloned me! Fucking  _cloned_ me, and I didn't know, and my family didn't know, and who  _knows_ who didn't know! If it's that hard for me, I can't imagine how hard it is for you. I... sorry, Sam. I'm sorry." He rubbed his temples awkwardly, and for the first time I realized that all this was taking its toll on him, too; for the first time, I saw his energetic and overconfident shell crack. "I just... I want to know about it, know more about it, to make myself feel better. But if you just feel worse..."

"It's..." I put my hand on his shoulder in an attempt to comfort him. "It's okay."

"It is?" He looked back up at me, hopefully.

"Well, no. It's not okay, it's not gonna be okay, it probably won't ever be okay. But, as long as we can move on..." I paused, thinking. "As long as we can move on to something else, it'll have to be okay, or we're just gonna rot here."

"Yeah." Jack nodded, scratching his beard. "But we can't just leave now. There  _has_ to be more down here. We've put it all on the line already, and we should get as much as we can before we pull out, right?"

I looked away from him, examining the tank - or suspended aquarium, as Pear Lady had called it - in the shared silence. I realized that the liquid wasn't a pure grey, but rather had a slight purplish tint. The cool, dim lighting also revealed that the liquid was slightly iridescent, almost like spilled oil, and shimmered slightly. I could recall only a faint memory of such a substance, but I couldn't be sure if such a recollection was real or just my imagination. That train of thought did, however, lead me to a more useful realization.

"Merlin." 

I said it mostly to myself, voice rough and tired, but Jack looked back. "Hm?"

"Remember Merlin Fischbach? That Darkiplier kid? He was from here, too."

"Was he." Jack's expression fell. Clearly, he shared the same opinion of the teenager as Mark and I, and that, at least, was comforting.

But I had a point to make. "Well, as far as I can tell, he was raised in the exact same environment and conditions as I was."

"So...?"

"So why is he so freaking arrogant? Theoretically, he should've had a similar sort of demeanor as mine, or to Mark. But he doesn't. He's just... He acts like a fifteen-year-old, a really obnoxious fifteen-year-old, and I'm assuming Mark didn't when he was eighteen, and I know I wouldn't have. So, what gives?"

"I... hm." Jack was fixated on a point behind me, pondering. "So you want to find his log?"

"If it's possible." I remembered that many of the logs were still long-defunct. "There might be something in it, if we can get at it. But where it is is a different story."

"Do you know his number?" 

"Something...  _something_ 051\. I don't remember exactly." I shook my head in frustration. My memory was usually so good, to have it forget such an important thing  _now_ -

"Three letters, right? There can't be  _that_ many combos of three letters through here, can there?" Jack scratched his chin in contemplation. "There must be a pattern, though. Where are these letters from?"

"SML..." I recited the first part of my identification number, long since ingrained into my mind. "The log said I was the sixth clone, so that's where 006 is from. But where is SML from?"

"SML..." Jack's voice trailed off. "Sounds almost like my initials. SWM. But it's not." He stood, lost in thought, for a moment, and I felt like we had hit a dead end until something occurred to me.

"Your last name's McLoughlin, right?" I couldn't remember if he had ever actually told me his surname, but I could only assume that it was the same as mine.

"Yeah, why?" He looked back at me casually, until he realized it too, and his expression jumped, finally smiling slightly. "So you're saying..."

"SML. Seán McLoughlin. First initial, last initial, major surname sound. SML, so..."

"MFB?" Jack guessed. "I think I saw something like that, actually, a ways back." 

"Then, let's..." I gestured behind me, "...let's go for a run."


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam and Jack learn more about Merlin.

The world spun around me, a dizzy haze of greys and blacks and florescent lighting, swirling slowly, slowly,  _quickly_ as I ran, warping and stretching as I panted, panted, panted, step by step by step by step. It was here - Merlin's tank - it was here  _some_ where, but where I exactly I couldn't tell you, couldn't guess. Jack behind me, panting too, but not as much as me. And that was how we ran, a glorious sprint, for at least half a mile across this strange, underground world.  
  
Green, the sign was; just like SML, just like all the others.  _MFB000._ I didn't smile,  _couldn't_  smile, not after reading the last log, but I was glad that we were here, that we were at the very least away from the SML aquariums. Jack beside me, and I didn't know how to feel; I trusted him more, far more, now than before the fateful Skype call a night before, but he still put me on edge ever-so-slightly, my mirror image a constant shadow. It would be enough to make anyone wary.  
  
"We're here," he said, and stepped forward. "Somewhere, down there, is Merlin's aquarium, or whatever she called it."  
  
"Yeah," I agreed, an acknowledgement of his words, and so together we followed the line of aquariums, into the inky abyss. Fifty-one, that was the tank - the fifty-first clone, the fifty-first clone of  _Mark_  - and since HESHE didn't seem to be reusing their aquariums, I could only assume it would be the fifty-first tank as well. "It'll be a long walk."  
  
"Really," Jack nodded, and together we meandered through the tank forest, too tired to run. Wires and pipes tangled over our heads, the ceiling an extensive corridor of electrical mechanism. Boxed in by the tall, silvery tanks, I felt almost claustrophobic. It was a quick pace that we took, however, and soon we found that we had arrived.   
  
It stood before us - tank  _MFB051_ , a behemoth of glass and steel, wires and slime. It was in better condition than mine; it wasn't shrouded by wires, but rather smooth and polished, eerily iridescent in the florescent lighting. The log box was clearly visible here - whatever had happened to mine had clearly been an accident. Jack approached the box hesitantly, almost warily, as if he expected it to jump out at him; I could understand why, given what the last one had revealed. I was adverse to it, but the box beckoned us anyway, and soon I found myself standing next to it, the box, the tank; huddled around it, ready to delve into the log within.  
  
Jack pressed the button, and a few moments later the startup screen glared back at us, so similar to the last.

> _Log: EHRP Experiment MFB051  
> _ _Observer: Ryan Randle_

"Randle?" I read. "Wasn't that... Wasn't that her supervisor? Why would he be an observer?"  
  
Jack was silent for a moment, studying the log. "They were probably short on people, I guess. Or they thought Merlin was important enough to keep a close eye on."  
  
"Makes sense," I said, and Jack began clicking through the log again. I watched over his shoulder, expectantly; almost  _hungrily,_  I realized, against my better judgement. Green text rolled by, in an effort to satisfy.  
  
These first entries seemed very familiar - Randle fretting about the embryo, the scientists' realization that the experiment was seemingly magically working, and then his notes on the fetus's development. Randle was, however, much more direct than Pear Lady had been - while the latter frequently diverted and recorded her thoughts, he was very direct and wrote little more than he needed. This was often simply noting what stage the embryo was in. He also made far more frequent entries than she did, logging nearly every single day. As we paged through, I watched Jack start to slowly shake his head - he was getting bored, and frankly, so was I, my hunger fed up with the uneventful transitions.  
  
Embryo transitioned to fetus transitioned to infant, and somewhere in there he was microchipped just the way I was. All was seemingly normal, until -   
  
"What's this?" Jack's eyes widened slightly, and he clicked back an entry. He was quivering slightly, unsure.

> _08.06.1999  
> _ _We don't have the resources to continue EHRP MFB051. The board is preparing a termination date._

"Wait, what?" I had to reread it again - once, twice - and even then, I thought I had misread it. "If they terminated it, then why is Merlin still alive?"  
  
"Maybe it was a different one?" Jack bit his lip.  
  
I shook my head. "No. We  _know_ this log is for 051. And 051 is Merlin. They wouldn't reuse a number - that's just stupid. So what...?"  
  
"We should keep reading," Jack said. "There are more entries. Something might've happened - they must've changed their minds."  
  
I nodded slightly, and he clicked it again.

> _08.08.1999  
> _ _Termination date has been scheduled for August 17._

"No. No, that can't be right." Jack again, hopelessly.   
  
"Keep reading," I urged, and he conceded. More text soon appeared.  
  


> _08.12.1999  
> _ _A few of the workers are advocating against the termination. They see it as a waste to end a successful clone, when it is one of just two. We can't keep it alive, can we?_

> _08.14.1999_   
>  _There have been words about keeping MFB051 in a stasis condition. If it can be kept alive with minimal resources until we get another grant, perhaps we can continue with it. The board is looking into it, as it may be a good opportunity to test the stasis theories that are in development._

"Well..." Jack shook his head. "No. I know what you're gonna say. But this is getting  _weird_."  
  
The next few entries were very short and seemed to come in quick succession:

> _08.17.1999  
> _ _Termination date for MFB051 has been postponed indefinitely._

> _08.18.1999  
> _ _The board is ready to attempt the stasis procedure on August 21._

> _08.22.1999  
> _ _It appears that the stasis procedure was successful. MFB051 will halt development both physically and mentally until it is brought out of stasis._

"So. That explains that, I suppose." I bit my lip - this was awfully unnerving, and it made me uneasy. But Jack's uneasiness was clearly far greater.  
  
"They just  _froze_ him?" Jack's expression was chaotic; he was confounded, frustrated, furious. "What the hell? That's... I don't even  _know_. It's way too fucking weird! That's  _not okay!_ "  
  
"Jack..." I urged quietly. I didn't like this either, but it had to be resolved, somehow. "Just keep going, okay?" He took a sharp inhale and nodded, slightly, and clicked the button. The next entry was dated almost two years later.

> _06.12.2001  
> _ _EHRP has been given a second grant. There are plans for more clones of the two successful DNA samples as well as to attempt to bring MFB051 out of stasis to continue development._

"Two years. He's two years developmentally behind where he is legally."  
  
"That's..." Jack let go of the box and stepped away, shaking his head. "That's just fucking weird. It's not right. I'm all for the advancement of humans but  _freezing_ someone for years? No. No, no, no, no, no. It's not right."  
  
I trailed him dazedly as he walked around toward the other side of the tank, wondering briefly how exactly they could have started the Merlin's stasis, and how they might have brought him out of it. Some kind of drug, I supposed, but there was really no way to know for sure - the concise Dr. Randle had little to say about how exactly the stasis procedure worked. I found myself musing on the possibilities to myself as my companion paced back and forth, his footsteps echoing behind him as if they were his shadow.  
  
He finally made his way back to Merlin's tank, and exasperatedly looked back toward that little black log box. I felt a need to acknowledge his expression. "Do we really need to read through this? I mean, we've got what we came for. More, even."  
  
I watched him grimace, and he leaned up against the tank, pounding it with his fist. He was frustrated, upset, and I didn't know why, I didn't know how, I didn't know how to stop it. I went to reach forward to comfort him, then decided against it, and he hit the glass again, and again, and again. And through this all, I began to see something appear, then grow, over the glass.  
  
A crack.  
  
"Jack..." This had to stop. Not his frustration, necessarily, but something else. "Jack, please stop. Something might hap-"  
  
And then something did.  
  
The crack in the glass shattered explosively, sending miniscule shards of glass cascading onto the floor, and the greyish goop inside the tank soon followed, at first merely spraying out of the thin opening until the opening widened, and the liquid gushed out, an overeager wave of silver and supernaturalilty. We reflexively jumped back, getting away from the ever-growing crack in the glass, and into a sheltered corner behind the tank. I stood for a moment, to take a deep breath -   
  
 _WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP_  - the sound was all around me, accompanied by what seemed to be an entire orchestra of buzzing and high pitched beeping. The sound, incredibly loud, rushed in through my ears, through my blood, through my core, freezing me in place. The dim florescent lighting was gone now - instead, the entire room had been flooded with red light, bright and scarlet and furious, and against the chaos I could barely hear my words of realization.  
  
"Jack. Jack, that's an alarm."  
  
Jack looked dazedly up at the ceiling, toward the screaming red lights. He grabbed my hand and stumbled forward, and somehow his words rang out against the wails. "We need to  _run._


End file.
